Member Web-Use: Not "Allowed"
David All
David All / President
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Clay Shirky
> enforce this rule?
Don't make the mistake of assuming an unpoliceable rule is also unenforceable.
They can enforce it the way we enforce parking rules, which is to miss
most violations, and then bring on draconian enforcement of enough
violations to create a chilling effect. This would also allow the
Rules committee to use enforcement as a selectively wielded stick.
As an analogy, despite two decades of open access journals, academics
still stick to closed access ones, even though those journals are
organized to specifically thwart academic goals of sharing knowledge.
The academics do this because the internal needs of the profession
(which journals matter most for tenure etc.) actually matter more to
them than the stated goals of the institution as a whole.
YouTube et al threaten to bring openness to the House, and to
normalize a channel in which franking privileges create no advantage
for incumbents. In a social environment as tight as the House, the
threat of unlikely but serious punishment, for an activity that
Members may not be in a hurry to embrace or defend anyway, will be
enough to make discussion with constituents out in the open an edge
case.
-clay
John Wonderlich
Member Web Use Reconsidered
- POSTED BY
John WonderlichNew lines are being drawn about the restrictions Members face when using the Internet.
House Minority Leader Boehner today released a memo, entitled the "Internet Freedom Alert", criticizing a letter sent by Rep. Capuano to the Chairman of the Committee on House Administration.
Member Web use restrictions are among the main Open House Project priorities, and one of the chapters of the report is about the restrictions set by the Franking Commission, which operates under the Committee on House Administration. (This chapter was written by David All and Paul Blumenthal.)
Boehner's letter today rightly sounds the alarm about Capuano's newly proposed Franking commission guidelines. In his letter, Capuano admits that Web use restrictions need to be redesigned, and proposes that acceptable Web sites and uses be compiled by the Committee, and that content from Members, when posted on outside sites, should "meet existing content rules and regulations", and should "not be posted on a website or page where it may appear with commercial or political information." (pdf)
While reconsidering or reforming these antiquated restrictions is a laudable goal, the proposed guideline reforms are only a half-measure toward modernized engagement online, and don't address the underlying problems with these unnecessary restrictions.
The Committee on House Administration and its Franking Commission are tasked with making sure taxpayer money isn't spent on commercial or political advertising on the Web. While there is good reason to limit incumbents' advantage to be gained online, Capuano's memo overstates the liability that comes when Members of Congress use popularly accepted communication tools. Exaggerating the risks online hamstrings Members and staff at exactly the time when they should be boldly engaging with constituents.
Communicating online involves only negligible cost, which means that the potential advantage given to incumbents, or the potential for a conflict of interest, is only very slight. Imagine a traditional example. No one would impugn the motivations of a Member who grants an interview to a very small newspaper in their district, where perhaps their grandchild is a journalist. Even though such an interview has a distinct financial benefit for the small paper, Members are free to speak with whomever they wish, and can be confrontational, or only pick interviews with sympathetic figures, at their discretion.
This discretion is important. Members need to be able to communicate freely, and the financial consequences of where their voice is featured are tiny compared to the possible consequences of trying to limit Members' speech.
Has it ever occurred that a Member gives interviews to only one particular newspaper? I doubt it. That just isn't the way motivations work in a political world.
If the potential for conflict of interest or political advertising is so low the context of the traditional press, then why are we treating the Internet differently? Is the Internet so unfamiliar, so public, that it should be considered undignified to have a video on the same page as a link that might link to pornography? That worry was reasonable in 1995, but not now.
People generally understand the potential of digital communications tools. Most services are provided without cost, and are open to public viewing, and, increasingly, public content submission. While this opens the door for disruptive participation, it also provides us with the immense potential of our shared digital connection, with consequences as fundamental as those of the printing press or the telephone.
If Members can use whatever brand of inkpen, or any brand of paper, or buy whatever shoes they want, they should be given radically expanded freedom to use the Internet, and make the same empowering discoveries that their constituents are. Even if that same pen was once used to scribble a ransom note.
The Committee on House Administration still has a line to draw, and plays an important function through the Franking Commission in preventing abuse of taxpayer funded resources. The restrictions, however, should reflect a balance between the liability they're meant to avoid, and the potential benefits Congress could realize. The conflict of interest (or undignifiedness), is minimal, at best, and the potential benefits are nothing short of revolutionary.
Citizens are overcoming their fears about engaging online, and Congress should follow suit.
Congressional staff working on reforming Franking restrictions should be praised for their efforts, and Republican Leader Boehner should be praised for his bold stance on such reforms.
Posted: July 8th, 2008 Tags: franking
John Wonderlich
Program Director
The Sunlight Foundation
(202) 742-1520 ext. 234
David All
deichmans
> If anyone else blogs about this issue, please ping the list.
>
http://oz.deichman.net/2008/07/house-of-representatives-v-web-20.html
John Wonderlich
Politician Using Twitter To Ignite Misleading Partisan Fight Over Politicians Posting To Twitter
from the politics-as-usual dept
Last month, I posted how cool it was that Republican Congressman John Culberson was really using Twitter to communicate with people. It was a great use of the technology. However, today he's been using Twitter to ignite a totally misguided partisan war, pretending (falsely) that Democrats are trying to prevent him from using Twitter. First, he announced on Twitter that "the Dems are trying to censor Congressmen's ability to use Twitter" claiming that "They want to require prior approval of all posts to any public social media/internet/www site by any member of Congress!!!" Fascinating, and troubling, if true, but it's not actually true...(much more post, available here.)
Culberson's reply available here.
Based on the friendfeed and twitter chatter I'm still seeing at this hour, I expect this to be all over the blogs tomorrow, probably covered from a bunch of different angles.
John Wonderlich
The really interesting part of the story might be the way Rep. Culberson managed to stir up attention through twitter.
Nothing gets attention through social media like hot stories about social media. :)
David All
Greg Palmer
http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2008/07/09/loose-tweets-sink-fleets-congressman
Loose Tweets Sink Fleets, Congressman
Sound, fury, and mailing regulations 2.0
US Representative John Culberson (R-TX) tweeted loudly in the spirit of Paul Revere:
"They want to require prior approval of all posts to any public social media/internet/www site by any member of Congress!!!"
"I just learned the Dems are trying to censor Congressmen's ability to use Twitter Qik YouTube Utterz etc - outrageous and I will fight them "
He still had room for "varmints" there at the end and some "green horny toads!" Shame the Texas Congressman doesn't utilize the 140 characters available to him. He does, however, tweet with the frequency of a twelve-thumbed quail in a BlackBerry patch.
Culberson has promised all day to corner those responsible—namely Bobby Brady (okay, "Robert Brady," D-PA), who is chairman of the Congressional Committee on Mailing Standards, and Michael Capuano (D-MA)—and Qik them. His concern stems from a letter Cupuano sent to Brady regarding the Committee on House Administration's and the Franking Commission's approval of official content posted outside the House.gov domain.
Maybe Culberson will find out when he Qiks them, since he ignored both TechDirt's Mike Masnick's and Tim O'Reilly's tweeted sleeve tugs (among others), that the letter is actually about loosening current restrictions, which regulate how Congressmen can use mass communication devices from telephones to email. That is, Culberson's upset about an already existing law regarding official content (is a tweet official?), and has pinned the blame for it on rival party members.
Those rival party members did seem to be looking for a way to extend the Committee on House Administration's and the Franking Commission's authority to Congress's use of websites and social media sites. Extending centralized authority would be alarming to any self-respecting Jeffersonian Republican, no doubt.
However, Capuano's goal in his letter, while extending authority into where Culberson must have considered a Wild West for talkative Congressmen (it wasn't), was to make it easier for members of the legislature to communicate to large groups of constituents outside the official government channels. As more in Congress become web-savvy and make use of web video especially, Capuano reports modern communicative possibilities far exceed the capacity of the government website. In short, we just ain't got the bandwidth for what the hipper legislators want to do here.
But restrictions on Congressional speech? Like it or not, they were there well before, set in place (presumably) as a safeguard against classified, incomplete, inaccurate, or damaging content being released en masse to the public by a US Congressman. Capacity for abuse? Definitely. But, unlike how Culberson seems to feel about himself, one cannot (currently) be simultaneously a legislator and a member of the press, not even the citizen media.