Want To Be Like Jon Stewart? New Governmental Open Data Standards Are For You

House Speaker John Boehner and Leader Eric Cantor sent a note to the House Clerk that told her to prepare "publicly releasing the House’s legislative data in machine-readable formats."

Currently, the public record is not stored in a standardized format, so it's difficult for developers to build software that can sort through all of the data, such as committee hearing transcripts, amendments, and upcoming items. Daniel Schuman, policy counsel for the Sunlight Foundation, a transparency watchdog and platform developer organization, says that machine-readable data will have exciting new consequences for democracy. First, reams of video and public transcripts will become easily searchable. The power of uncovering embarrassing statements has, for the past decade, best been illustrated nightly by political comedians like Stewart and Stephen Colbert. While campaign speeches, TV interviews, and debates are often carefully sanitized partisan rallying cries, the substantive conversations of congressional subcommittees reveal the political underbelly of an institution steeped in quid pro quo politicking, shallow understandings of legislation, and the occasional off-the-wall crazy statement. Computer searchable transcripts may make finding these gems much easier. Second, Schuman says that programmers might be able to uncover interesting patterns of influence, such as how talking points ripple throughout the unconscious lexicon of Capitol Hill. For instance, do congressmen parrot the arguments and phrases of Rush Limbaugh or Rachel Maddow? Computational advances in social networking analysis could easily be applied to transcript data, revealing fascinating epicenters of influence. Finally, Digital Communications Director for Cantor, Matt Lira, is most excited for the innovative ways that entrepreneurs can make volumes of raw data commercially useful. In part, this is because "The government, in general, is pretty lousy at interfaces," admits Lira. In an interview with Wired, U.S. CIO Vivek Kundra recounts the history of how data has led to enormous market opportunities for tech entrepreneurs.