Capuano wrote on June 24: "Unfortunately, many Members who wish to
display video on their websites have found that the existing tools
available within the House to do so are not user-friendly or efficient,
and that in addition, server storage space within the House is currently
insufficient to meet the growing demand for video."
http://www.house.gov/capuano/news/2008/st070908.shtml
I translate this as: We want to use video and, further, we want it to be
ad-supported.
In my understanding, it wouldn't be a problem for a Member to simply pay
for hosting video and embed a brand-less player on his webpage. Right?
If if Carl was saying the Internet Archive will providing free hosting
for official videos, and since there are perfectly fine free/open source
video players out there (as far as I know), then there's really no cost
to post videos on Member webpages. So what's actually the problem?
Clearly Members wouldn't politicize and distort an issue like this. (I'm
sorry. I have hardly heard a line as repulsive as "Apparently the
Republicans spreading these lies would rather operate without rules and
open the House to commercialism." For someone talking about "dignity,
propriety, and decorum" he obviously doesn't know how to exercise
discretion --- whether the claim is true or not.)
Anyway, my first point is that there is a decoy issue being floated
around, that somehow Members don't have the ability to post videos on
their websites. They could do it for free, and if they didn't want to do
it for free, they could pay for it out of their budgets, and if they
didn't want to pay for it with their current budgets, they could
increase their budgets.
Well, someone has to pay for it, and if they aren't going to go through
a nonprofit, then they are *choosing* to use an ad-supported system.
Right? Either they use a nonprofit service, they pay for it with
taxpayer dollars, or they pay for it with advertising dollars. They get
to choose.
Then there's an orthogonal issue of wanting to use services to
distribute their message, like YouTube and Twitter. As Government 2.0ish
as it is, I think this is a serious concern. An endorsement is an
endorsement and it sets up a conflict of interest. Will Twitter's
investors start funneling money into Capuano's campaign if he makes
Twitter the only approved place, or it becomes the de facto approved
place, for capitol microblogging?
I think we're in an unfortunate position of only having bad examples.
YouTube and Twitter are already de facto standards and an endorsement
from a Member wouldn't change anything. But let's just wait for a small
venture startup to make it onto the approved list, make millions, and
then become buddy-buddy with franking commission members.
This is just the type of situation that we normally are talking about
preventing on this list.
Yet, it doesn't have to be all or nothing. Services like YouTube and
Twitter are important to improving communication, and there's a way to
make it work without an endorsement. The model is what we already have
with RSS feeds, or with independent people re-posting content they find
on YouTube. Open content plus data standards, and failing data standards
then entrepreneurial citizens, and failing that then campaign
operatives, means communications can be republished by any
communications service. I think Carl started to raise this point.
So given a choice between:
Option A: Members choose ad-supported content and endorse venture startups.
Option B: Members publish with open content.
I think option B is a tad better.
(Phew. I didn't mean to write so much.)
--
- Josh Tauberer
- GovTrack.us
"Yields falsehood when preceded by its quotation! Yields
falsehood when preceded by its quotation!" Achilles to
Tortoise (in "Godel, Escher, Bach" by Douglas Hofstadter)
John Wonderlich wrote:
> The issue has raised a larger question than the one originally intended
> to be addressed in the house -- video.
>
> The Senate is in the midst of reconsidering their recommendations too
> (see congress daily today, sub only
> <http://www.nationaljournal.com/congressdaily/cda_20080711_8450.php>).
>
> The question now before the Franking Commission is how to update what
> Pelosi and Capuano have both admitted are "antiquated" restrictions.
> They have to balance legitimate concerns -- decorum, commercialization,
> and improper taxpayer funded political content -- against what all
> involved parties have recognized as immense potential online.
>
> Clearly, the current rules are unclear, unevenly enforced, and poorly
> understood. That this "hooptedoodle" (great word!) is even possible is
> evidence of that point, which I don't think is in question by anyone.
> The need for an update, revision, loosening, recodification, or
> whatever, is well accepted on the hill.
>
> Dismissing the argument as being about a trendy web service misses the
> more interesting thing that's going on here: We're seeing the
> leadership from both parties in the House affirm the role of technology
> and public engagement in representative democracy, in an explicit,
> practical way. Of course it's adversarial, that's what party leaders do.
>
> There are a ton of other reforms I'd like to see addressed, and I'm
> hoping that we'll soon have a slew of other accomplishments and issues
> to focus on, public congressional video (go Carl!) among them.
> *
> The useful thing /we/ can do, though, is to recognize that the people on
> this list are probably the best equipped people to help define what
> acceptable web use looks like. It isn't an easy problem.*
>
> I'm trying to focus on what's clearly the case. The rules need to be
> updated, confident engagement online with clear standards is the goal,
> and right now the chilling effect of a combination of restrictive and
> unclearly enforced rules is keeping Congress from doing as much as it
> should online. (I talk a lot more about this in my interview with Dave
> Witzel here
> <http://interviews.forumone.com/content/interview/detail/1577/>,
> especially starting at "what's the steak without the sizzle?)
>
> So, I'm hoping we can start to talk more about the details of member web
> use restrictions. What really constitutes commercial endorsement? When
> does conduct become unacceptable or undignified? What role should
> Congress play in enforcing those questions online? Where do the edges
> of "official duties" lie anyway? Are we treating the Internet
> differently than we do traditional media? (See Boehner's recent post
> <http://republicanleader.house.gov/blog/?p=234> for an expansion on this
> theme.)
> *
> Probably more importantly, what are the principles we can use to
> approach those questions with clear minds?*
But this is no different from Members appearing more frequently on
Fox, no? Commercial is commercial and ad-supported is ad-supported, so
I have a hard time seeing how we should be concerned about Twitter but
not, say, the New York Times.
In fact, to re-write one of Joshua Gray's points:
## New York Times
"The New York Times is based upon the ink-on-paper format, and the
print industry is a large supporter of inconvenience in access and
copying, and has a long track record of trying to bring that
inconvenience to the Web, via both paywalls and experiments with DRM.
This means that if we want to have a completely accessible and
redistributable content, either developers need to risk being sued by
the New York Times, or we need to take painstaking care to not violate
the IP. So, we don't have a completely accessible system at this time,
but it's not because people do not have the technical know-how, it's
because the New York Times has not taken sufficient care to respect
user-freedom."
There is no new issue access here -- we let Members talk to
ad-supported media all the time, even yo startups, like Politico.
The problem is that the lines between modes of carriage and types of
media are now hopelessly blurred, never to return to their former
crispness of "Paper mail is like this whereas TV is like that", so we
need carriage-insensitive rules as well.
I agree that the rules should mandate open standards, but making the
rules also forbid Members to go where their constituents already are
seems to me like a not-great principle.
-clay
I have a somewhat different take on what’s going in this debate over the actions of the Franking Commission. The debate so far has primarily and most eloquently been at a policy level, and it has effectively analyzed the inanity of Rep. Capuano’s policy reasoning. However, I think Rep. Capuano’s political reasoning—of course, never mentioned in his official public statements—is quite sound.
Strategies to pursue power can be divided into two broad categories: the outside game and the inside game. Those in junior positions or the minority tend to benefit most from playing the outside game; those in the leadership or the majority benefit most from the inside game. All this is well documented in the political science literature. Accordingly, it is rational for those in leadership positions and the majority—such as Rep. Capuano—to try to create rules to weaken the outside game. I think if you reflect carefully you’ll see the logic of this political communication game played out in countless other ways, too. You might consider Rep. Capuano’s preferred public policy undemocratic and therefore not like it (and I would agree with you on that). You might also dislike the flimsy public policy rationales he has put forth. But none of this necessarily adds up for me to an argument that Rep. Capuano doesn’t have an astute sense of the political logic of this new technology.
--Jim Snider
iSolon.org
You're right that Members would seem to make endorsements when talking
with the media. But I think you've shown also why it's different.
Members don't have an approved outlet for TV communication, and afaik by
and large Members don't stick to particular outlets either. They endorse
Fox just as much as they endorse Steven Colbert. There's also an
inherent difference between personal interviews --- which you can only
do 24hrs per day of --- and distributing information resources --- which
has no bound.
Maybe a closer example would be sending an op-ed to a publication. There
is nothing inherent in the nature of an op-ed preventing the same op-ed
from appearing in many publications at once, so why endorse particular
ones? Maybe because publications won't print something that will appear
elsewhere.
But it seems like when there *is* a technological solution to avoiding
an endorsement of a particular technological service, Members ought to
take advantage of it. Let's start with a simpler case --- if they are
going to post videos on YouTube, don't you think it would be nice if
they at least posted the same videos in a non-commercial place,
considering it doesn't cost anything to do so?
Or, well, look, maybe endorsements are the least of our problems. If
someone suggested instead that whatever rule that prevents online
endorsements be removed, then I'd support that. But then it's not just
about YouTube or Twitter. It becomes about GovTrack too, for instance.
Some twenty Member websites are using my district map Google Maps
mashup. If they're allowed to embed YouTube, they better link back to
GovTrack when they use my service too.
Matt Stoller
http://www.mattstoller.com
Washington, D.C. 20007
202-459-4968 (Newsroom)
301-275-6645 (Cell)
mark.t...@gmail.com
mtap...@dcexaminer.com
http://www.examiner.com/
Proprietor,
Tapscott's Copy Desk blog
http://www.examiner.com/blogs/tapscotts_copy_desk
"Tether the state in the morning and by noon it knows the full length of its tether." ---John Cotton (Paraphrased, actually)
Sent via BlackBerry from T-Mobile
To: <openhous...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: [openhouseproject] Re: the annotated commission report ...
Do you really believe that? That there are no politicians who don't
favor one media outlet over another?
> There's also an
> inherent difference between personal interviews --- which you can only
> do 24hrs per day of --- and distributing information resources --- which
> has no bound.
But personal interviews *are* information resources, the minute the
interview is over.
> Maybe a closer example would be sending an op-ed to a publication. There
> is nothing inherent in the nature of an op-ed preventing the same op-ed
> from appearing in many publications at once, so why endorse particular
> ones? Maybe because publications won't print something that will appear
> elsewhere.
That's part of it, but its also because someone submitting an OpEd to
WashPo vs. WSJ is also making a calculation about what audience they
want to reach.
> But it seems like when there *is* a technological solution to avoiding
> an endorsement of a particular technological service, Members ought to
> take advantage of it.
This is where I came in, because it doesn't seem that way to me at all.
All media is going digital, so treating the rules for newspapers
differently from video is a mug's game.
> Let's start with a simpler case --- if they are
> going to post videos on YouTube, don't you think it would be nice if
> they at least posted the same videos in a non-commercial place,
> considering it doesn't cost anything to do so?
Do *I* think it would be nice? Well sure, but then I've been running
Linux since 1996 and I CC license the contents of my blog. But I'm
also not in the habit of confusing my preferences with good policy.
The policy we need is going to have three goals -- preventing Members
from directing taxpayer dollars to media outlets, maximizing citizen
access, and operating the same way across all media. As long as we
tolerate politicians sending contents to some ad-supported outlets,
its hard for me to see how you can draw a defensible line between some
ad-supported outlets being OK and others not, and you will never be
able to ban politicians cooperating with all such outlets.
-clay
"And say, finally, whether peace is best preserved by giving energy to
the government or information to the people. This last is the most
certain and the most legitimate engine of government. Educate and
inform the whole mass of the people. Enable them to see that it is
their interest to preserve peace and order, and they will preserve
them. And it requires no very high degree of education to convince
them of this. They are the only sure reliance for the preservation of
our liberty."
I believe that having things posted on commercial sites is OK, but
there is much we can do when posting to insure that it can reposted
elsewhere. For instance, I generally add the following clause to much
of what I post/write/publish:
"Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article are
permitted worldwide, without royalty, in any medium, provided this
notice, and the copyright notice, are preserved."
You can make as a precondition to interviews you give that it be
ascribed something similar. The key will be for us and the rest of the
public to begin getting good at moving these to repositories and in
public formats that make them widely accessible.
Hopefully overtime this will not be a two step process, or it will
become an automated process, but, we shouldn't, as they say, try to
stand still on a moving train. There are things we can do to help
ensure that our information and knowledge can be passed along to the
public as widely as possible, and we must begin working together to
ensure that this can happen.
I think if we, people outside of the inner legislative arenas, quibble
too much about where and when things are published, too much, we will
detract from the positive and exciting opportunities we have to
continue moving forward. Yes, people will capitilize one whatever they
can, wherever they can -- we needn't look further than CNN to see how
effectively one can make money from politics. But, we, those of us who
care about the positive aspects of information sharing, have a great
opportunity to encourage the kind of positive, co-operative, and
_informed_ progress our legislative body needs at this time. We are
approaching the tipping point and I think we all need to do one last
big heave-ho to get it there :-)
-Josh
I guess the important thing I was trying to say is that we seem to be
getting a bit combative on this issue, when I see it as an opportunity
for us to come together and put forth a cohesive and sensible reform
of the franking commission. I think we all find some of the
restrictions senseless --- although I appear to be a bit confused
about the rules, despite having tried to better understand them
(<http://gop.cha.house.gov/services/franking_commission_whatisfrank.htm>).
I look forward to your report, John. Thanks!
-Josh
--
Joshua Gay
[m: 617.966.9792 irc: jgay twitter: joshuagay]
Culberson's unabashed tweets on this matter are awesome. He is showing
citizens what makes his job hard. Whether it's raising money on a busy
week in congress, or it's not having enough time to read the bills --
his candidness and openness are a blessing. I'm not sure how that
relates to the franking commission, as my confusion on this matter has
already been made public, but I'll add my last two bits on the subject
by quoting Jack Welch from his book, Winning, where, when writing
about the remarkable absence of candor in the workplace, he states,
"In a bureaucracy, people are afraid to speak out. This type of
environment slows you down, and it doesn't improve the workplace." I
think this applies to Culberson's workplace as well.
Oh, and, he just tweeted again, "@bythebayou Note that social media
commun spoke & I listened & adjusted my position to amend rules to
treat new media just like old media"
So, well, he's being candid and he's listening, too :-)
Sent from my iPhone
-----
Unsolicited mass communication does *not* include:
* Web sites (including a Member's official web site) and other
electronic bulletin boards on which information is posted for voluntary
public access
Web Sites
2. Member's Web sites must be located in the HOUSE.GOV host-domain and
may be maintained by either House Information Resources (HIR), the
Member's congressional office, or a private vendor.
5. ...Member offices maintaining their sites on the Public web server
are required to incorporate the exit notice into their external links.
The content of a Member's Web site:
1. May not include personal, political, or campaign information.
2. May not be directly linked or refer to Web sites created or
operated by a campaign or any campaign related entity including
political parties and campaign committees.
3. May not include grassroots lobbying or solicit support for a
Member's position.
4. May not generate, circulate, solicit, or encourage signing petitions.
5. May not include any advertisement for any private individual,
firm, or corporation, or imply in any manner that the government
endorses or favors any specific commercial product, commodity, or service.
-----
I also perused the Franking Commission's Red Book [2] but I didn't find
anything relevant to this century. It specifically defines mass mailings
as messages either 1) individually addressed, or 2) addressed generally
to a congressional district's members "for general distribution to
postal customers" (p22). I see this as easily applying to email, but not
at all to something like YouTube or Twitter.
(I understand that there may be unsaid interpretations of various rules
at play, but being an outsider I obviously don't know them.)
The first paragraph in what I quoted above from CHA seems like it
*permits* posting something on YouTube and Twitter --- that is,
something for people to view directly on YouTube or Twitter. Except,
modulo what I write below. The last point (bullet #5) would indicate
that they cannot mention YouTube or Twitter on their websites --- that
seems to rule out embedding and linking.
Capuano wrote "current CHA regulations have been interpreted to prohibit
Members from posting official content outside of the House.gov domain".
Where does that come from? The websites bullet #2 (the first #2)?
Am I missing anything?
[1] http://gop.cha.house.gov/services/membershandbook.shtml
[2] http://cha.house.gov/PDFs/franking/franking2.pdf
It does strike me, though, that this would be a good time to get the congressional leadership and/or rank and file on record with regard to the proposals set forth in the Open House Project. What about a questionaire for all House candidates asking for their positions on issues of congressional transparency? The responses could provide a foundation for reform efforts in the next Congress.
Just a thought.
It does strike me, though, that this would be a good time to get the congressional leadership and/or rank and file on record with regard to the proposals set forth in the Open House Project. What about a questionaire for all House candidates asking for their positions on issues of congressional transparency? The responses could provide a foundation for reform efforts in the next Congress.
Just a thought.
---- Josh Tauberer <taub...@govtrack.us> wrote:
>
"Members should ask the Franking Commission on guidance on frankability. All frankable material shall be acceptable for transmission on the Internet. Any inquiries regarding the particular use of an Internet service, including whether such use is personal, campaign or unofficial, shall be directed to the Committee on Standards of Official Conduct."
"The creation and operation of Members' official web sites must be in support of the Members' official and representational duties to the district from which elected.2003: Committee on House Administration repeals the 90-day election blackout period.
Office web sites may not: include personal, political, or campaign information; include advertisements or endorsements for private individuals or entities; and directly link to any web sites created or operated by campaign or partisan political organizations."
Thanks for the additional info, Paul. I'm not sure if the first
paragraph is still a part of the relevant rules (?). As for the second
paragraph, is there a place we can find these rulings or are they as
inaccessible as one might expect?
On June 24, Rep. Mike Capuano (D-Mass.) sent a letter to
House Administration Chairman Robert Brady (D-Pa.) urging the committee
to update its guidelines governing Member Web sites. While Capuano's
proposal improved the status quo, it ignores the current practice by
House Members.... (rest of piece here; sub only)