1.3: Meetings of House, Senate, and Committees

Other Information:

When the House, the Senate, committees, and subcommittees have their meetings, the business of the people is being done. Can the public learn easily about what meetings are happening, where they are happening, when they are happening, and what they are about? It depends on which side of the Capitol you're on. The Senate is pretty good about publishing notices of committee meetings. From a webpage with meeting notices listed on it,28 there is a link to an XML version of the data to automatically inform the public. If a particular issue is under consideration in a Senate committee meeting, this is a way for the public to learn about it. This is authoritative, it is available, it is machinediscoverable, and has some machine-readable features. That means any application, website, researcher, or reporter can quickly use these data to generate more -- and more useful -- information about Congress. The House does not have anything similar for committee meetings. To learn about those meetings, one has to scroll through page after page of committee announcements or calendars. Insiders subscribe to paid services. The House can catch up with the Senate in this area. Where the House excels and the Senate lags is in notice about what will be considered on the floor. The House made great strides with the institution of docs.house. gov, which displays legislation heading for the floor. This allows any visitor, and various websites and services, to focus their attention on the nation's business for the week. Credit is due the House for establishing this resource and using it to inform the public using authoritative, available, and machine- discoverable and -readable data. This is an area where the Senate has the catching up to do. For different reasons, the House and Senate both garner Bs. Were they to copy the best of each other, they would both have As.

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