January 15, 2007

Legislative Database Update

Tennessean reporter Jessica Fender, who wrote the Monday story about how difficult it is for members of the public to track bills through the state legislature's publicly-accessible legislative database site (which I also wrote about earlier Monday), has a follow-up on the paper's political blog The Plaza:

The legislature's tech gurus said that the internal bill tracking system lawmakers use is actually a program - like software - that must be installed on a computer. It would be a major undertaking to redesign it for the Web, and those marching orders would have to come from the Senate and House speakers, Stephen Kriegish, the guy in charge of the legislative information services. Right now resources are sapped by efforts to update the archaic programming language the state uses, he said.

First the question: Is that software something the state licensed from an outside vendor, or is it software that the state's IT folks cobbled together? If it's the latter, can be installed on a PC?

If the state's IT folks wrote a legislative database search tool, well, it seems that would be another electronic document subject to the state's open record laws. And if it can be installed on a PC, then the state has no reason or right not to make that software downloadable by the public, and to make the legislative database much more easily accessed and searched by the people of Tennessee.

If there's some technical reason why that's not possible, and if the legislature's info-tech folks are too swamped to build an easy-to-use public interface, there is another solution: Release the relevant technical information and software codes to the private sector to allow private sector web developers to develop a simple-to-use online search tool.

The information in that database is public record and subject to the state's open-records law. Allowing the private sector to improve access to it would be an elegant and fitting way for our legislative leaders to fulfill the open-records law's expressed requirement that the open-records law "shall be broadly construed so as to give the fullest possible public access to public records."

The public does not currently have the "fullest possible access" to the legislative database, even though, from a technical standpoint, it would not be difficult to create that access. The private sector could step in here and do what the state's IT people say they don't have time to do - and I have no doubt there would be several IT experts from the private sector stepping up to do exactly that.

Update: I have emailed Stephen Kriegish, the director of Tennessee's Office of Legislative Information Services, to inquire if the software would work if, hypothetically, it was installed on a non-legislator's PC. I have also asked him what his office would need to do from a technical standpoint to enable private-sector web developers to built a web interface/search tool connected to the database.

I believe gaining access to that database ought to be a big open-records push for the news media, not just among bloggers and blog readers, and victory would mean every media outlet in town, including bloggers, could link to bills and vote tallies, and provide their web readers their own easy-to-use search tool to sift that database. I believe it is well within our reach, technically, so the only real obstacle is institutional. Pressure from bloggers, citizens and the media can make that pressure crumble. This is not a partisan issue - this is about government transparency and accountability, period.

Meanwhile, in the comments below, you can already see the private sector stepping up to offer solutions...