Bill Would Require Public Information To Be Online 139
Andurin writes "A bill that was introduced in the US House of Representatives last week would require all Executive Branch agencies to publish public information on the Internet in a timely fashion and in user-friendly formats. The Public Online Information Act would also establish an advisory committee to help craft Internet publication policies for the entire US government, including Congress and the Supreme Court. Citizens would have a limited, private right of action to compel the government to release public information online, though common sense exceptions (similar to those for FOIA) would remain in place."
Example of public information in Ireland (Score:4, Interesting)
I don't know that we have such a law in Ireland despite a *lot* of online information. Some Irish examples:
Irish Statute Book: http://www.irishstatutebook.ie/ [irishstatutebook.ie]
Oireachtas (Houses of Parliament): http://www.oireachtas.ie/ [oireachtas.ie] (including all past parliamentary debates)
Citizens Information: http://www.citizensinformation.ie/ [citizensinformation.ie]
All very useful for both everyday use (particularly the latter) and political research (although it would seem our journalists aren't that interested in searching the parliamentary debates to dredge up interesting material - there's a *lot* there but it doesn't appear in the media!)
I can see how the proposed US legislation if properly implemented might help (but might be completely unworkable). In the Irish case, those three websites are the tip of the iceberg as there are a plethora of official sites (even if for example citizensinformation collates and presents much of the pertinent information in one place). Most or all government departments for a start have their own sites. For a lot of government services, people have to act through their local county council - each of these has its own website (some are very proper and comprehensive, others are less so).
Examples of the 36 or so council websites (you might check these e.g. for waste/recycling facilities, contact details for water or local road problems):
Dublin City: http://www.dublincitycouncil.ie/ [dublincitycouncil.ie]
Cork City: http://www.corkcity.ie/ [corkcity.ie]
County Cork (rural south): http://www.corkcoco.ie/ [corkcoco.ie]
County Mayo (rural west): http://www.mayococo.ie/ [mayococo.ie]
County Meath (Dublin commuter/eastern): http://www.meath.ie/ [meath.ie]
Is PDF "user friendly"? (Score:4, Interesting)
PDF seems to be the format of choice for this sort of thing. Indeed, in addition the Adobe's own reader, free ones like kpdf exist too and, for some reason, politicians care to preserve the exact formatting of the pages. (Yes, I know, lawyers need that, but they could — and do — just as easily refer to the sections and paragraphs...)
But the format could be perfectly evil by, for example, prohibiting printing of the viewed document... For example, the New Jersey Fire Prevention Code [iccsafe.org] are deliberately non-printable — and even kpdf obeys that restriction (you can still print it by running it through pdf2ps first, but try to teach your mother that).
On top of that, it is also too easy to just scan a printed page into a PDF — as a monolithic (and thus not searchable) bitmap.
Is the law being discussed smart enough to address these two problems? I don't think so...
Re:minimal conversion sounds best (Score:3, Interesting)
That brings up a good question: how are the documents (especially bills and amendments) created, internally? Do they just have interns punching away at Word documents or have they commissioned some sort of specialized collaboration software?
Your mention of "wiki-style" gets my mind whirling with cool concepts for ways of making bills easier to share between congressmen and more open to the public.
How about congress? (Score:4, Interesting)
They should make a law that requires transcripts of all discussions with lobbyists to be published.
And define a lobbyist as "anyone who claims to represent the opinions of anyone else".
useless unless (Score:4, Interesting)
There is actually a lot of public information "on-line", but it is rendered almost useless because many .gov websites ban spiders from crawling through them and Google (and I assume others) obey this ban. I have actually found some information that was very valuable to me, but only because I found and followed the right links. These pages on a public website under the .gov tld were never indexed and could not be found easily as a result.
I would suggest that the law require that spiders not be banned from open public sites, otherwise it is a sham. I would also suggest that Google considers who really owns the information on .gov sites and considers programming its spiders to not obey such a bogus instruction.
Re:One place where they could mess up... (Score:3, Interesting)
On the other hand I also have a lot of scanned PDFs that had automatic OCR done by the scanning software, and these are in fact searchable (and the text is selectable although a little off-target sometimes)... So both vector and bitmap encoded PDFs can optionally contain the plaintext required for searching, but this is in no way mandated by the format. So I guess both were right and wrong, and would know that this is not inherent to PDF if they looked a little further...