On Dear Colleagues

[John Wonderlich]

I've talked to probably 6 people on this list with ideas about publishing Congress' "Dear Colleague" letters.

Dear Colleagues are letters sent between Members of Congress, often daily, often detailing legislation and asking for support or cosponsorship.  The Committee on House Administration recently announced new plans to "allow for greater categorization and customization of electronic Dear Colleagues."

CHA also notes that staff sometimes receive up to 70 of these letters per day, a rather astounding number.

My question is this:

Is there reason to either push for the publication of all Dear Colleague letters (or some subset of them)?  What would be the ideal publishing method, and what might be a good incremental step toward that?

I expect that most members would welcome Dear Colleagues' publication, since they're written similarly to press releases, and are about getting attention. 

On the technical side, I expect that an ideal situation would be for the House system to offer a "public" option for Dear Colleague distribution, where the default is public.  In the meantime, cc-ing some predefined third party public ingestion email would probably work, with that email connecting to a database and a public facing index of dear colleagues, functioning on an opt-in basis.

Any reactions or ideas?  I'm especially interested in any thoughts on why this would be a bad idea, since I can't think of any.



--
John Wonderlich

Program Director
The Sunlight Foundation
(202) 742-1520 ext. 234

[Chris Kinnan]

One possible hurdle is that many dear colleagues contain newspaper
articles and other copyrighted content...

[David Weller]

I've never seen one before, but I take it that it is a formally structured personalized letter from one congress member to the next about a bill in legislation.  I wonder if it is similar to the type of letter a representative sends to his constituent in reply to a bill vote request.  People would be interested in that, but it hopefully won't deter them from sending their messages to their rep. for a YES or NO vote.

David Weller
www.AllThingsReform.org

[Peggy Garvin]

See background information in this CRS report:

http://www.llsdc.org/attachments/wysiwyg/544/CRS-RS21667.pdf

 

In the past, commercial fee-based systems have carried Dear Colleague letters, but not comprehensively.

 

I agree with Chris – inclusion of copyright-protected material would keep some Dear Colleagues out of a public system.

 

 

Peggy

www.garvinconsulting.com

 

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[citizencontact]

Having set up the first electronic Dear Colleague system for the House
of Representatives (there apparently is a recent upgrade), I tried to
help offices post the Dear Colleagues on their web sites. Also since
the Dear Colleagues often ask others to sign up for cosponsoring
legislation or adding themselves to a group letter, I included a way
to do that on a content management system I built. I have been working
on a new version of this, but have been unable to find any funding to
continue this project. There are lots of potential roadblocks that I
worked out how to get around. By helping the congresspeople add the
Dear Colleagues to their own site as content made the most sense. My
first web version even included metadata that made searches on press
releases, dear colleagues, etc easy based on which bill and other
legislative metadata.

I continue to look for help for this project as well as many others to
help Members have the tools and the understanding to put this type of
information out and end the best format for pulling and searching.

Daniel Bennett
www.advocatehope.org

On Jul 7, 2:08 pm, "John Wonderlich" <johnwonderl...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I've talked to probably 6 people on this list with ideas about publishing
> Congress' "Dear Colleague" letters.
>
> Dear Colleagues are letters sent between Members of Congress, often daily,
> often detailing legislation and asking for support or cosponsorship.  The
> Committee on House Administration recently announced new

> plans<http://cha.house.gov/view_press_release.aspx?r=20080624104634>to