Newt Gingrich vs New Media

Newt Gingrich, the former Speaker of the House who arrived in Washington the same year as C-SPAN, in 1979, was quoted in this 1994 New York Times article based on an interview he had with CNN:

We’re going to require that everything be submitted — not only in written form, but electronically, so that every American can pull up exactly the same information as the highest-paid Washington lobbyist. And we think that’s going to mean a much more open House with much more participation by citizens all across the country.

Fast forward 14 years and while Americans (and anyone in the world with a computer and internet access) can visit a dot-gov server and read congressional hearing transcripts and track federal appropriations legislation, pieces of Newt’s vision remain unmet.

For instance, while the Congress enables web searching of lobbyist disclosure forms, members of Congress, who according to a 1978 statute are required to file personal financial disclosure forms, don’t allow their own forms to be searched.

Where is the openness?

Should the feds pack up and get out of the website building business, as a recent article in Yale’s Journal of Law & Technology suggests?

The idea has merit, says Nancy Scala in an article this summer on the Personal Democracy Forum:

The consensus has long been that congressional websites are almost comically bad. The online presences of federal agencies and departments often suffer from the expectation that users have a bureaucrat’s knowledge of what they’re looking for and how to find it; take, for example, the food recall section of Recalls.gov, which expects the user to know which government agency has jurisdiction over that funny-tasting ham sandwich.

But there is hope in progressive leaders and rising stars in the federal government, such as policy expert Mark Drapeau of the National Defense University, who, in his third guest post on Mashable.com, indicates “there are serious and well-thought out efforts to increase understanding of the value” that collaboration and communication, not to mention a healthy PR image, is happening across, around, and in between the social web.

As you may sense, I am passionate about overcoming (or in Drapeau’s words, “empowering”) the stalemate between old and new.

Newt is alive and well on newt.org but his website needs a kick in the motivational groin. It’s great there’s a blog and pictures and various graphics and news releases, but the site in general is old. And, he’s old. But does he still yearn for the governmental openness on the web? Is he willing to practice on his new site what he preached to his old site?

Newt, what do you say? Do you, like me, have a Google Alert whenever someone blogs about you? Should the feds pack it up or are you willing to show them what you can do as fodder for what they can do?

What say you, Newt? And what say YOU, dear reader?

No related posts.

Tagged as: newmedia

Comments: