It may be a while before the people who run the U.S. House of Representatives’ Web service forget the week of September 29, 2008. That’s when the enormous public interest in the financial bailout legislation, coupled with unprecedented numbers of e-mails to House members, effectively crashed www.house.gov. On Tuesday of that week, a day after the House voted down the first version of the bailout bill, House administrators had to limit the number of incoming e-mails processed by the site’s “Write Your Representative” function. Demand for the text of the legislation was so intense that third-party sites that track Congress were also swamped. GovTrack.us, a private site that produces a user-friendly guide to congressional legislation, had to shut down. Its owner, Josh Tauberer, posted a message reading, “So many people are searching for the economic relief bill that GovTrack can’t handle it. Take a break and come back later when the world cools off.”
Once people did get their eyes on the bill’s text, they tore into it with zeal. Nearly a thousand comments were posted between September 22 and October 5 on PublicMarkup.org, a site that enables the public to examine and debate the text of proposed legislation set up by the Sunlight Foundation, an advocacy group for government transparency (full disclosure: I am a senior technology adviser to Sunlight). Meanwhile, thousands of bloggers zeroed in on the many earmarks in the bill, such as the infamous reduction in taxes for wooden-arrow manufacturers. Others focused on members who voted for the bill, analyzing their campaign contributors and arguing that Wall Street donations influenced their vote.
The explosion of public engagement online around the bailout bill signals something profound: the beginning of a new age of political transparency. As more people go online to find, create, and share vital...
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Micah—terrific, important article, I just wanted to point out one minor but important inaccuracy. In the section on EveryBlock, you write that it's "all on a Google Map." In actuality, we expressly decided not to use Google Maps, and in fact developed our own map tiles and interface to our custom needs.
I mention it because, while Google Maps is a great product, it's not a one-size-fits-all situation, and there are a lot of options for organizations of all shapes and sizes when it comes to web-based cartography. I understand that it has kind of a Kleenex / Xerox-type efficacy when it comes to describing a tool for others—everyone knows what a "Google Map" is—but it's time to move past the singularity of Google Maps mashups and acknowledge the broad ecosystem of the geo web.
Posted by Paul Smith on Thu 15 Jan 2009 at 06:13 PM
This *is* a great article, but I'm a little confused about an article that hypes the wonder of the web and has no hyperlinks.
Posted by Katie on Mon 9 Feb 2009 at 04:38 PM