Docs.house.gov Changing the Rules of the House for a digital world

Enabling greater transparency and public access for committee documents through changes to House Rules.

Who owns the data? Before Rules changes, what was the situation? What was changed in House Rules? Why create a repository (docs.house.gov)? Policy Implementation Initial Results Next steps in 2014 Future ideas

Which House entities own data & documents? – Individual Members own their office records. – Legislative research and draft measures and amendments are protected by Speech or Debate. – The Speech or Debate Clause is a clause in the United States Constitution (Article I, Section 6, Clause 1). The clause states that members of both Houses of Congress...shall … be privileged …for any Speech or Debate in either House, they shall not be questioned in any other Place.United States ConstitutionArticle ICongress – Legislative materials are protected until introduced in committee or filed with the House.

Which House entities own data & docs? (cont) – Committees effectively own their own records subject to certain requirements in House Rules. – The House owns bills, resolutions, amendments when filed with the Clerk. Amendments may also be published by the Rules Committee as they structure the rules for debating measures. – Committees file Reports with the Clerk which are numbered as House documents. – Published committee hearings are committee documents.

Before – House Rules established minimum requirements for archiving, Member access, etc. – House Rules require committee reports accompanying legislation in some cases. – Houses Rules permit committees to print hearing transcripts and submissions but not required. Inserts may be scanned which inhibits searching. – Committee web sites are not standardized, nor is the content permanent.

Rules changes for a digital Congress Base legislative matter published 24 hours in advance Votes taken (B)(i) Except as provided in subdivision (B)(ii) and subject to paragraph (k)(7), the result of each such record vote shall be made available by the committee for inspection by the public at reasonable times in its offices and also made publicly available in electronic form within 48 hours of such record vote. Information so available shall include a description of the amendment, motion, order, or other proposition, the name of each member voting for and each member voting against such amendment, motion, order, or proposition, and the names of those members of the committee present but not voting. Amendments adopted in committee (6) Not later than 24 hours after the adoption of any amendment to a measure or matter considered by a committee, the chair of such committee shall cause the text of each such amendment to be made publicly available in electronic form. Webcast meetings, markups, and hearings (5) To the maximum extent practicable, each committee shall— (A) provide audio and video coverage of each hearing or meeting for the transaction of business in a manner that allows the public to easily listen to and view the proceedings; and (B) maintain the recordings of such coverage in a manner that is easily accessible to the public.

Which is all good, but … The electronic records required in the Rules are not: – Standard format – Standard location – Required to be permanently available Not as useful as they could be. So the House also made …

Further rule changes in 2011:  Clause 3 of Rule XXIX provides that a measure or matter will have been considered as having been publicly ‘‘available’’ within the meaning of the rules if it was publicly available in electronic form at a location designated by the Committee on House Administration.  Clause 4(d)(1)(E) of Rule X directs the Committee on House Administration to establish and maintain standards for documents made available in electronic form by the House and its committees.

Committee Repository Project Purpose Create a permanent, centralized repository for committees to store committee documents related to committee meetings, markups, and hearings; Provide tools for appropriate House staff to post committee documents related to committee meetings, markups, and hearings; Provide access to these documents via the web for the public and congressional community. At its most basic, this phase includes the following: – Acquiring and setting up an infrastructure to handle the number of documents that will be posted to the repository over time; – Providing the committees a way to post documents to a central repository; – Providing the committee the URLs to their posted document(s) so they can link to the repository on their website; – Providing a public search; Providing the public a view of scheduled committee meetings.

Highlight of Results Uses of docs.house.gov 1.Sunlight is in the process of diving very deeply into docs.house.gov -- moving all of their House committee hearing apparatus to use it, and is starting now to download all the associated PDFs/docs from hearings and make them searchable. They should end up in Sunlight's Congress API and Scout before long. 2.Generate committee hearing schedules for entire congress. Both as alerts and a page listing everything in chronological order. (+ alerts to approximately 20k users) and (+ alerts to approximately 3k users & automated tweets go out whenever a bill appears on the calendar, like here)here 3. Internal efforts using the repository - transfer hearing details to committee web sites (in progress).

Standards for the Electronic Posting of House and Committee Documents & Data Promulgated by the Committee on House Administration In accordance with the Speaker’s initiative to increase transparency of House and committee operations, the Committee on House Administration, as directed by House rules, has established the following standards for posting House and committee documents and data electronically. These standards will be phased in and will be subject to periodic review and reissuance. They are intended to ensure that Members and the public have easy, advance access to legislation considered by the House and its committees.

House Documents:  Bills to be considered by the House  Resolutions to be considered by the House  Amendments to be considered by the House  Conference Reports to be considered by the House Committee Documents:  Committee rules  Bills to be considered by committees  Resolutions to be considered by committees  Prints or other legislative text intended to serve as the base text for further amendment  Meeting Notice  Witness List  Witness testimony  Truth in Testimony disclosure forms  Public notices  Amendments adopted by committees  Committee record vote

House Documents Through the issuance of these standards, the Committee on House Administration directs the Clerk of the House to establish one centralized website where Members and the public can access all House documents in a downloadable, open format within the time frames established by House rules. This centralized location shall be established for House Documents no later than January 1, XML Standards Committees are encouraged to post documents in XML when possible and should expect XML formats to become mandatory in the future. The Office of the Clerk will update XML standards as required to support these documents. The XML standards will be publically available at File Naming Standards The Office of the Clerk will publish and maintain naming standards for each document to be posted. These standards will facilitate automated searching and uploading of such documents. Files will be posted using permanent URL links. These links will facilitate outside and committee usage of these files. In addition, permanent URL links will allow each archived committee website to maintain functionality. Committee Documents Until the completion of the centralized website for committee documents, House committee will be responsible for posting its committee documents in a searchable PDF format in an appropriate location on the committee majority’s website. When XML versions of documents are available they should be posted at the same location. Video Requirements Committee video of hearings and markups will be stored by the House to meet requirements for archiving, access, searchability, and authenticity.

Next Steps in 2014 – Transition Roll Call votes from PDF to XML Office of the Clerk developed a program to easily generate one or more committee Roll Call votes in XML format. – Support Hearing Transcript production Extend file naming standards to support all elements of a hearing transcript.

Other thoughts for expansion – Reuse meta data in repository to automate setup of webcasting and associated archiving. – Use repository to streamline workflow Requirement to note in Digest which announced witnesses actually testified. Create new screen in repository administrative interface Create calendar view for committees including full committee and subcommittees’ schedules.

Resources – – ov/files/112-BT-112RuleChngs pdf – posting-standards posting-standards – /files/documents/committee_docs/CommitteeReposit ory-NamingConventions-v1-2-1.pdf /files/documents/committee_docs/CommitteeReposit ory-NamingConventions-v1-2-1.pdf

Thank you for your time. Questions? Mr. Reynold Schweickhardt Director of Technology Policy Committee on House Administration