I'm heading over to Heritage to do the 10am panel on the Open House Project.  The streaming video is here.

Lots of fireworks in the House, so use this as a comment thread for either C-Span chatter or mockery of me for being at Heritage.

There's more...

I'll have a longer post up today on the Open House Project (part of the Sunlight Foundation), which officially unveiled its report in the Capitol this morning.

Minority Leader Boehner and Congressman Brad Miller were there to discuss transparency and putting a bit of Web 2.0 into the House.  Republican David All and Democrat Philip de Vellis put out this video upon the launch of the event.  It's so bipartisan.

I want to give a special shout-out to Brad Miller, who had to run off to a predatory lending hearing after his remarks.  He's been on that issue for the last four years, before it was cool.  Congressman Miller talked about citizens and journalism, and in a true sign he gets the ideology of the open left, analogized what we do to the partisan press of the late 18th century.

What I've learned from this project is that bringing Congress into the 21st century is happening, with good people all over the Hill and outside of the institution.  It's just an organizing problem.

More soon, but we should note that this whole governing thing can be pretty cool.  Cocktail weenies... Mmmmm...

There's more...

Yesterday I went to the Senate-side of the Capitol building, and I was stopped by a security guard who asked me where I was going, who I was going to see, and who invited me.  He didn't answer my questions about the Capitol until I had satisfactorily allayed his suspicions.  I adopted a disarming tone, and he let me through with a grudging wave to the metal detectors.  And then when I went inside I had the same experience with someone at a desk who looked at me with deep suspicion before looking up my name and letting me through.  This isn't to say that we live in an authoritarian state or anything, only that this is supposed to be the people's legislature, and surrounding it are huge blocks of concrete, armed guards, and an attitude of castle-like fortitude.

This isn't going to go away anytime soon, but it is meant to be unfriendly to citizens.  That should stop.  Rob Bluey at the Heritage Foundation has a good Op-Ed on citizens' access to Congress in the context of bloggers doing journalism on the web that are unattached to an official media organ.  This Op-Ed is part of the Sunlight's Open House Project, which is a series of reports on how Congress can open itself up to the public via a systematic embrace of the internet.

Journalists from media companies make up the committee that governs the Periodical Press Gallery. They oversee admission to the gallery and administer its strict rules.

Many of those rules would automatically disqualify bloggers, such as the requirement that applicants must provide daily coverage of Congress -- a prerequisite that would be burdensome for any one-person operation. Another rule prohibits gallery members who work for nonprofits, severely limiting the number of bloggers who could apply.

A much-overdue solution would be to create an Online Media Gallery to oversee the credentialing process. This gallery would serve as a sister organization to existing congressional press galleries, adapting the rules of those galleries for individuals who operate exclusively on the Internet. The formation of the gallery would allow a committee of peers to establish new rules applicable for websites.

This doesn't mean Congress should throw open its doors to just anyone, which would undoubtedly draw security concerns and create space issues. However, with its own rules for membership, the Online Media Gallery would allow citizen journalists who cover Congress to at least have a fair shot at securing credentials.

In addition, the new Online Media Gallery would alleviate the problem that exists with access to lawmakers. Currently, bloggers seeking to gain access to events in the U.S. Capitol must secure approval from a congressional office, letting staffers control the credentialing process and creating the potential to discriminate against certain bloggers whom members would like to exclude.

Our legislative chambers should be friendly places for citizens to go to retrieve information.  Many members of Congress get this, on both sides of the aisle, and it's kind of a downhill battle to move us to a fully open Congress.  We'll get there eventually, since the political case is too compelling.

In the meantime, I want to be able to get the same access the press gets to cover Congress and its various hearings, and I don't think the AP should get to say whether I qualify or not.

There's more...

C-Span is loosening their copyright policy.  Nancy Scola gives today's news on C-Span some context.

So what C-SPAN has done today is to decide that as long as two important conditions are met -- (1) C-SPAN gets credit, and (2) no money is made off of their work -- this footage is free to be used far and wide.

It's important to remember that, when it comes to C-SPAN, we're really talking about two kinds of content. One is the "official events" mentioned above -- that's the stuff recorded by C-SPAN-owned cameras. This includes congressional hearings, press briefings, that sort of thing. What's still a bit unclear today is whether the rules of the game have changed at all for the coverage of the House and Senate floor that C-SPAN also distributes. As we've talked about before, what C-SPAN is doing there is packaging and branding the public domain feed shot by government-owned cameras. More clarity on that content would indeed still be welcomed.

All in all, today's news is fairly remarkable. The dust-up between Speaker Pelosi and the House Republican study group that raised attention on C-SPAN's control issues occurred just three weeks ago tomorrow. The concerted push to comport C-SPAN's policies with the modern use of online video only really ramped up in the last two weeks. What does that mean for the Open House Project? Only good things, I think. Seems as if this is a propitious time to be in the open-government business.

It really is a remarkable time to be in politics and governance right now.  C-Span is a cable-backed business that has traditionally maintained aggressive control over its copyrighted materials.  This is not unusual.  What is unbelievable, and it really is quite remarkable, is how quickly they changed their policy in response to public debate and discussion.  I honestly don't know if they are doing this in good faith or not, though I do feel that Brian Lamb should be commended for his willingness to take public input and work with it.

I'm also not sure if the non-commercial restrictions on C-Span content mean that people can or can't load video clips onto Youtube, Google video, or sites with advertising.  The point is not to loosen copyright restrictions for its own sake, after all, the point is to give citizens the tools we need to debate politics unfettered by pointless restrictions.  The acid test is whether C-Span actually will allow citizens to debate political content on sites like Youtube and the Dailykos, sites that make money through advertising but that do not specifically sell copies of this content.  I'm also not sure why C-Span decided to keep half its content restricted; even though the closed programming is produced by C-Span, C-Span argues that it is a public service.  I think that they should open all their content to being useful as tools for political debate, and that their unwillingness to do so somewhat undermines their moral point.

All of this being said, C-Span's move to loosen its hold over political content is a terrific step in the right direction.  My guess is that they are going to generate more revenue than they did before, and see over the next few years creative use by the public of the extremely valuable content they have collected over the past twenty or so years.  I hope that this will convince the leadership of C-Span that they made the right choice in loosening their control over content, and that other news organizations will follow suit.

Right now, as with the Fox News discussion with the Nevada Democratic Party leadership, we're seeing a tremendous opening up of political discourse.  The internet is becoming not just a tool with which to wield political power, it's becoming a recognized and run-of-the-mill place to do politics.  That's very good.

There's more...

I was at the Heritage Foundation for the first time yesterday, meeting with their Director of their Center for Media Policy, Rob Bluey.  Bluey is helping coordinate the Open House Project (you can sign up for the Google group here).  I've noticed two interesting things, one about the right and one about how Congress works.

One, many right-wingers really are serious about transparency in government.  This isn't true of everyone on the right, of course, but it's also not true of everyone on the left.  The conservative movement had a strong transparency element in the late 1980s, and that hasn't disappeared.

Two, Congress has a culture that is remarkably antithetical to the openness of the internet.  Most staffers can't join listservs or post on blogs because of severe press restrictions, which has the effect of ensuring that the only people who can communicate with most of the people who run the place are people in DC that can get meetings or have phone calls with them.  The internet world is shut out.  The argument used to justify this culture is that staffers and resource groups are there to serve members of Congress only.  I find this puzzling.

Hopefully some of these restrictions will be loosened over the next few years, and Congress will begin to let staffers communicate more effectively with the public.

There's more...