Wanted: A More Digital Congress

When it comes to taking advantage of all the Internet has to offer, some media gurus say Congress is a little behind the curve.

Danny Glover, a tech expert at the Media Research Center put it this way: Most of the world is adapting to the so-called “Web 2.0″ phase of interactive, open source Internet programming. Congress is “maybe in a Web 0.5 phase.”

The consensus among most panelists as the Politics Online Conference in Washington seemed to be that Congress and the White House aren’t doing all they can — and should — be doing to incorporate average Americans into government.

Even in 2008, legislators still seem to be in the “early adopter phase” of developing their personal Web sites, said Mr. Glover, who added that the few congressmen who keep blogs only do it to seem “cool.” (Panelist Johanna Shelton of Google, however, gave props to Ben Nelson, senator of Nebraska, for keeping an online diary of his recent trip to Iraq.)

Some of the ideas tossed out during the break-out sessions were making congressional proceedings available on Web sites other than C-Span and making more government documents accessible to search engines. That’s doable with “a couple hours of coding,” Ms. Shelton said.

Another way to share content online with voters, said Sascha Meinrath of the New American Foundation, is including access to a program like Google Documents, which allows multiple users to edit the same document. The idea is that if congressmen put a preliminary draft of a bill in an open source program on their sites, then specialists out in their home districts could amend the language or add information that hadn’t been addressed for the legislator to consider.

“We should be tapping into that expertise,” Mr. Meinrath said. “Peer production is a massive untapped resource.”

Mr. Glover added: “We’re trying to make it easier to be involved and get more people involved.”

Both of those gentlemen acknowledged that politicians face a kind of Catch-22 when it comes to making their work more transparent. Statements and videos they post online can be taken out of context or re-edited.

One of the most successful examples of a government-run Web site is WhiteHouse.gov, said David Almacy, a former Internet director for George W. Bush’s White House. The site gets about 3 to 7 million page views per week, and provides policy information — and the popular Barney Cam holiday videos — to Internet surfers.

(To see how far the president’s official Web page has come, Mr. Almacy suggested looking at the original White House site under Bill Clinton, which can be accessed through the National Archives in all its cutting-edge-at-the-time glory.)

The most technologically advanced move made by the White House came this year, when the White House submitted its 2008 budget electronically for the first time, complete with President Bush’s e-signature.

But the president’s page is far from open-source. An “Ask the White House” feature has been running since 2005, but Mr. Almaty said “this president will never blog.”

And Ellen Miller of the Sunlight Foundation, which pushes for more government transparency, said the White House site is mostly full of P.R.-friendly statements.

As with any revolution, Mr. Meinrath said, some uncertainty lies in whether Congress will ever make use of all the Internet tools available to it. “That’s an open question,” he said.

Mr. Glover had a, well, slightly morbid outlook: Congress might not become more technology-forward “until older people are voted out of office or die.”

NYT | Ariel Alexovich | March 5, 08