Most of us have become accustomed to offering our preferences and opinions on social networks. We have the “like” button on Facebook for the updates our friends share – pictures, news, and videos. On YouTube, you can mark a video as a favorite. You can share it, flag it, add it to a playlist, and leave your comments on it.

This week, YouTube launched YouTube Town Hall, a place where you can watch videos created by members of Congress. They are speaking on topics such as the budget, energy policy, education, health care, the economy, and the war in Afghanistan.

Like everywhere else in social media, you can weigh in your opinion “supporting” a video’s message by clicking the support button. You can also share videos with your friends. YouTube’s Town Hall page opens with the motto: “Watch the debates. Choose your side.”

The videos can be viewed in debate mode, with two videos (offering opposing messages) sitting side-by-side, or by what YouTube calls the “Leaderboard,” which ranks the videos from the ones getting top support down to the least supported.

You can even ask questions on policy. If enough people give your question a “thumbs up,” it may become one of the top-rated and selected each month to be answered by a member of Congress!

I am keenly interested to see whether this will catch on. Is this the town hall of the future? Could it reshape the way we conduct campaign debates? Let’s see!

Have a good weekend.

This week’s Highlighted Site of the Week is the General Services Administration’s Dipity (yes, Dipity), or social timeline, for U.S. Government use of Social Media.

The first entry on the timeline, showing the very beginning of our government’s use of social media, is April 1st, 2002, when the White House Easter Egg Roll was streamed live on the internet. Other landmarks include the announcement that “Ask the White House” was first put online in April 2003, how iTunes first offered presidential speeches in July 2005, Apps for Democracy was launched in October 2008, and Data.gov was inaugurated offering the public 47 databases in May 2009.

What is the latest entry on the timeline? On April 11 the Smithsonian Institution livestreamed Ignite Smithsonian session through UStream. The broadcast was called “Citizen History: Making History with the Masses” and is archived here.

Here is an interesting article by Federal Computer Week. They reference the timeline and ask the question, “Is government adoption of social media slowing down?”

Have a terrific weekend!

Baseball season is here and every year, members of the U.S. Congress (Republican and Democrat) face off in a venue other than the Capitol – on the field. The U.S. House Office of the Clerk website has a fun series of pages for the event: The U.S. Congressional Baseball Game. This year, on June 17, the 50th game will be sponsored by CQ/Roll Call.

In 1909 the first game was put together by U.S. Rep. John Tener (R-Penn.), who had been a professional baseball player from 1885 until 1890. The games have been very popular and over the years the proceeds have gone to various charities.

They have been held in different places: American League Park,Griffith Stadium, D.C. Stadium, RFK Stadium, Memorial Stadium, Four Mile Run Park, and Prince George’s County Stadium. Since 2006 they have been held at Nationals Park.

The games were put on hiatus a few years during the Great Depression and World War II. They are said to have gotten in the way of getting legislation passed in Congress a few times!

The Office of the Clerk site can give you a history of the rosters, and a great stats page showing where the games were played, who won, and the final score.

Attendance in the 1926 game was 4,000 as the Republicans held a parade with a live elephant and the Democrats paraded a donkey. (Democrats won that year.) The first game to be covered by radio broadcast was in 1928, and lately the games have been covered on Twitter and Facebook.

The Congressional Baseball games have not been immune to the problems of ethics. This Fox News article reports how Rep. John Ensign had to sit out of the 2009 game because of his admitting to having an affair. Apparently his skills on the field were missed!

Here is a Roll Call video from the 2010 game. Pure fun: 2010 Congressional Baseball Game Music Video.

Let me know if you are going!

As part if its Weekly Historical Highlights, the website of the U.S. House of Representatives Office of the Clerk remembers the very first presidential inauguration at Federal Hall in New York City. On April 30, 1789, the inauguration ceremony for George Washington was held in Federal Hall, where Federal Congress first met before moving to Philadelphia. The Office of the Clerk site gives an account of the event and says Washington was very humbled by the occasion.

The original building was located on Wall Street. It was built in 1700 and originally served as the New York City Hall. From 1785-1789, it served as the capitol where Congress met. According to the U.S. Senate website: “When Congress convened for the first time on March 4, 1789, the old building had been converted into a splendid capitol, optimistically renamed Federal Hall.”

The National Park Service (NPS.gov) gives us a great picture of the landmark events that Federal Hall has witnessed: “After the American Revolution, the Continental Congress met at City Hall and, in 1787, adopted the Northwest Ordinance, establishing procedures for creating new states.When the Constitution was ratified in 1788, New York remained the national capital. Pierre L’Enfant [who designed the city plan for the District of Columbia] was commissioned to remodel the City Hall for the new federal government. The First Congress met in the now Federal Hall and wrote the Bill of Rights.”

The NPS goes on to say that when the nation’s capital was moved to Philadelphia, the building went back to being New York’s city hall. In 1812 the building was torn down and a new one was opened in 1842, functioning first as the Customs House, then as a Treasury, and finally as a national memorial to Federal Hall.

If you are in New York City, there is tour information for Federal Hall here and here. You might wish to follow the New Amsterdam trail that starts at Castle Clinton and ends with Federal Hall.

Have a great weekend!

This week our Highlighted Site of the Week is Women in Government Relations (WGR). The site was referred to me by Rebecca South, who is a Federal Compliance Associate at State and Federal Communications. Rebecca has been a member of Women in Government Relations  for seven years.

The group is doing amazing work that deserves attention. Spend some time on the their website and you’ll see how active they are. The group was founded in 1975 and boasts a membership of over 750 women and men from many places in the profession. According to the site, there are 65 U.S. Representatives and seven U.S. Senators who are WGR Emeritus members.

The organization’s goal: “WGR is committed to the advancement and empowerment of women at all career levels of government relations. By offering leadership opportunities, mentoring, partnerships, networking and educational programming, WGR cultivates our members’ personal and professional growth.”

Women in Government Relations offers programs and workshops, as well as a mentoring program and professional internships. They also have a WGR Toastmasters group where members are given the opportunity to improve their public speaking skills. Their website has a career center where job seekers can meet employers online.

The WGR calendar is full with their Signature Events like the Charity Golf Tournament, the Emeritus Member Tea, the Charity Scavenger Hunt (sending members all over Washington, D.C. looking for clues), the Spring Gala, and much more!

Another great resource for members is the WGR Task Forces and Working Groups: “In addition to annual events, WGR hosts regular briefings, roundtables, and panel discussions as well as brown bag luncheons with policymakers and other government affairs professionals.”

WGR’s website is rich with information, but if you want the latest news, I suggest connecting with them via social media. You can find their Facebook here and you can join their LinkedIn Group here.

Well, it is April 15th, and I couldn’t resist the temptation. This week’s Highlighted Site of the Week is the Library of Congress’ History of the US Income Tax website, as well as a few other great pages.

The site opens with the line: “If, in the midst of sorting receipts and studying the latest changes in the US income tax laws, you suddenly wonder ‘What is the origin of this annual ritual in the weeks leading up to April 15th?’ here are some places you can go for answers.”

What you get on the Library of Congress site is a brief history of the laws that have regulated the taxation of personal income (on and off) since the time of the Civil War. They offer a bibliography of printed material for further reading, but where they really shine is in their links to other sites.

Among the links, you will find the U.S. Department of the Treasury, its history of the Treasury and its history of taxes. The Library of Congress also points us in the direction of the IRS’ Brief History of the IRS page.

By far the most fun will be found at the Tax History Project, where you can wander around the Tax History Museum with its interactive time line. The museum covers topics from our origins of colonial commerce circa 1650, up until today. You can visit an image gallery of Cartoons and Posters from the History of U.S. Taxation, or study the tax returns of  President Barack Obama, former presidents like Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, and former presidential candidates at the Presidential Tax Returns page. You can also find many papers and speeches on taxation, like Ronald Reagan’s 1986 speech on Tax Reform.

Best wishes to you for your tax filing and if you need a lift of spirit, here is an article about all the freebies companies are offering on Tax Day!

A great deal of attention is being paid these days to mobile phones, mobile apps, and how these things will change political campaigns, elections, and the interaction between government and citizens. So when I saw this item on KStreetCafe blog, I thought I ought to share it this week as our Highlighted Site of the Week: The Mobile Citizen Summit.

On April 16, Mobile Citizen Summit will be held in Washington, D.C. According to their site, it is “a one-day learning laboratory for those interested in applying mobile technologies to empower, fuel and drive citizen engagement in the public good.” It promises to enlighten attendees on the possibilities that mobile technology opens up, to show the latest gadgets and apps, and to give existing case studies of businesses that are successfully using mobile apps.

Registration appears to be free and as of right now there are 156 available tickets. The Planning Committee of Mobile Citizen Summit are even open to receiving input on what topics should be covered in the all-day event and are taking suggestions for adding speakers to their agenda.

If you cannot attend, you may wish to follow them on Twitter (@mCitizenSummit) and their hashtag #mCitizen.

Have a terrific weekend!

Smart phone photo by John Karakatsanis on Wikipedia.

Last September we highlighted GovLoop.com and talked about some great Gov 2.0 features they offer like the lists of government social media contacts and their many discussion groups. I find myself taking in a quick scan of their network almost daily, and I am always delighted by the new and powerful Gov 2.0 things they offer. So today we highlight GovLoop.com revisited.

Here is a grab bag of GovLoop pages where you could lose a few hours exploring and come away smarter for it. (It sure beats losing a few hours playing Angry Birds!)

Mobile Apps for Gov’t lists 36 mobile phone apps by the name of the app, the organization behind it, and the smart phone platform that can use it. Among the apps listed, you will find the White House, iCongress, FDA recalls, FBI Most Wanted, Library of Congress, and state portals like California, Oklahoma, Texas, and Utah.

Are you new to government contracting and procurement? GovLoop has a Terms Every Government Contractor Must Know list.

Are you doing a story on Open Government? GovLoop has 358 programs listed on its List of Open Government Projects.

(more…)

This week is Sunshine Week, when people across the country celebrate the importance of government transparency and warn against the dangers of government secrecy. The organization behind the celebration has a website, SunshineWeek.org, and this is our Highlighted Site of the Week.

According to the site, Sunshine Week is “a national effort spearheaded by the American Society of News Editors. The key funder has been the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, with significant support from ASNE Foundation. In 2011, The Gridiron Club and Foundation contributed $10,000.” The week-long celebrations include groups across the country finding creative ways to raise awareness for freedom of information – through songwriting, hosting public forums, having classroom discussions, writing editorials to newspapers, and much more. This week also marks the 12th National Freedom of Information Day on the 16th.

The White House honored the week. Steve Croley, Special Assistant to the President for Justice and Regulatory Policy, offered this blog post on the White House blog in honor of Sunshine Week. They have provided their analysis of how transparency improvements have been made on their Open Government Initiative web page.

For more information about Sunshine Week, you can follow their blog. You can also find many resources on the United States Department of Justice’s Freedom of Information Act website (foia.gov). Another item of interest to our readers is the “Best Practices for State Campaign Finance Disclosure, 2010” from the National Institute on Money in State Politics found on followthemoney.org.

Have a terrific weekend everyone!

Mashups have become all the rage on blogs and websites. A mashup is the craft of taking existing material (data, text, art), mixing it up, and turning it into a new derivative work. Some can be just fun, like taking two songs that were recorded decades apart and making a new song out of it. Some can be helpful, like combining information from weather websites, adding the power of Google Maps, and a dash of poignant Twitter conversations, and voilà – you have great detailed coverage of a storm during an emergency.

Some mashups can be very powerful. Today’s Highlighted Site of the Week is Data.gov. With its May 2009 release of government data sets by Federal Chief Information Officer Vivek Kundra, Data.gov allowed very clever people to put out mashups that could change our lives. Data.gov has two goals – “democratizing public sector data and driving innovation.”

The amount of information is staggering: elections, federal government finances and employment, state and local government finances and employment, banking, demographics, and much more. On the site, the data sets can be searched by category, by government agency, or both.

Here is where the artistry comes into play. Groups and individuals have mashed the data sets to come up with something quite revealing. One group, DataMasher.org, allows visitors to the site to combine data from Data.gov. Some of the results are interactive maps that show federal spending per U.S. Representative, total per capita contributions to political candidates, and federal spending per political contribution by state.

Another example is Tetoncode.com, which put together an API that shows federal contracts per state. And there is so much useful information being revealed about health care, FDA inspections, unemployment statistics, job prospects, and housing foreclosures.

I think we can expect to see mashups on blogs and across social media platforms as a standard in the near future. Who knows – they could become game changers in campaigns and elections.

What mashup would you like to create?

Images courtesy of Data.gov and Datamasher.org.

In honor of Presidents Day (I have opted for the Associated Press Stylebook spelling), I wanted to share two websites where you can explore and learn about the Presidents of the United States in a fun, new way.

The first one is Google Earth. Always a great site for seeing the world at warp speed, Google Earth has a feature called the U.S. Presidents Showcase. Of course, you have to download the software for Google Earth before you can take the ride, but it is quick and easy to install and worth the trouble. The U.S. Presidents showcase allows you to travel the country seeing the birthplace of each president. A brief profile of the president appears showing when and where they lived and when their term of office was. It also shows a shaded map of which states voted during each president’s election. You can even see the White House in 3D!

The second site is the Smithsonian Institution’s National Portrait Gallery Hall of Presidents. In this online exhibition of the museum’s south wing gallery, you can find the portrait of each United States president up until Bill Clinton – although on Clinton’s page they show a bust of the president by sculptor Jan Woods, and no portrait.

If you happen to be one of those people who is snowbound today, or just find yourself with a little time to kill, have a blast meeting Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Millard Fillmore, Ulysses S. Grant, and all the rest on Google Earth. Say hello to their portraits at the Smithsonian, too.

Have a terrific weekend.

Transparency International (TI) has this motto: Corruption hurts everyone. Based in Berlin, Germany, TI is a  non-governmental and non-partisan organization with a coalition of more than 90 local chapters throughout the world.

Founded in 1993, Transparency International monitors and reports on international political and corporate corruption. They look at how corruption affects political parties and the election process, lobbying, international trade, defense issues, and government procurement. TI’s work has directed the world’s attention to the problem of corruption and how it affects people, especially the poor. Among its accomplishments, the organization has played a big role in establishing the United Nations Convention against Corruption and the OECD Anti-Bribery Convention.

From TI’s website you can learn many things about the organization and global corruption. My favorite feature is the 2010 Corruption Perception Index. It has an interactive map reporting the perception of government and corporate corruption for people in most nations of the world. Looking at their scale from zero (highly corrupt) to 10 (very clean), I held my breath before I saw the score for the United States. I was happy to find out we earned a 7.1 – pretty clean. I was disturbed to see how many places all over the world fell into the corrupt categories.

In addition to giving us a terrific web design, the people at Transparency International are savvy with social media. TI has put a great deal of engaging information on Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, and their blog. You can even find a podcast and a free iPhone app.

For anyone who cares about the worldwide issues of good government, Transparency International deserves your close attention.

Last December, the U.S. Census Bureau released the results of the 2010 Census. Officially, there are 308,745, 538 people living in the United States. The number is quite important in deciding where federal and state funding will go and also in deciding U.S. congressional apportionment – the process of dividing the 435 congressional seats among the 50 states based on each states’ population as counted in the census.

Wondering how your state fared in the 2010 Census? The U.S. Census Bureau published an interactive map of the census data and the Apportionment data. Our state, Ohio, lost two seats in the U.S. House of Representatives this time around.

The apportionment process is mandated in the U.S. Constitution in Article I, Section 2 and then superseded in Section 2 of the Fourteenth Amendment. By the way, when they first began the apportionment process in 1790, there were 4 million people living in the U.S. and the ratio was 33,000 people per congressional district. Now it is estimated that there are 700,000 citizens per congressional district.

Lobby Comply reader Nancy Messmore pointed me in the direction of the U.S. Census Bureau and the 2010 Census results. As a librarian, she pointed out that the U.S. Census Bureau has a partnership program and the American Library Association (ALA) was one of the key partners. Thanks to this program, the 2010 Census became more of a grassroots effort and less of a top-down government task. Thanks to the partner organizations, the 2010 Census was able to boast of a 74% mail-back participation rate. The ALA offers a great fact sheet for educators (and one for communities) about the census and its importance.

If you are wondering how the U.S. congressional apportionment is calculated, it is easy, really. Here is the formula. Well, alright, maybe not so easy.

Instead, here is a video by the U.S. Census Bureau explaining the process:

Take care and have a good weekend!

President Barack Obama delivered his 2011 State of the Union Address to a joint session of Congress on January 25. If you missed it, it’s not a problem, you can watch an archived video on the White House website. What you may have missed is the “Gov 2.0 style” conversation that surrounded the event.

Gov 2.0 is a term that gets thrown around a great deal to describe the new way government and citizenry can interact through technology. I think the State of the Union Address 2011 is a dramatic example of how far social media has changed the way government operates.

All we have from George Washington’s first State of the Union Address is his manuscript and that is pretty much it – precious as it is.

For the State of the Union 2011, Whitehouse.gov provided live video online (now archived) of the speech, a transcript of the text, and a photo gallery. You can also download it on iTunes.

But it was what happened after the event that we see where Gov 2.0 really came into play. The White House provided the chance for an exchange with the American people. According to Whitehouse.gov: “In the days following the State of the Union Address, President Obama and senior Administration officials held a series of live online events to answer your questions.” Through social media, the White House took in questions from the public and then answered (some of) them.

On the Whitehouse.gov SOTU site you can see a video of President Obama responding to questions. You can see Vice President Joe Biden fielding questions on Yahoo. There are videos of what was a series of live online roundtables with White House policy experts in the areas of the economy, education, foreign policy, and healthcare. Live from the White House,  senior White House officials also answered questions about issues covered in the speech and you can see it on YouTube.

From the website, you can receive email updates regarding the State of the Union address or follow the White House on Twitter and Facebook. Connectivity, it’s all about connectivity.

If you want more, there is plenty out there. One of the coolest websites – stateoftheunion.onetwothree.net has an interactive word cloud that allows you to see exactly how many times a word is used in all of the State of the Union Addresses by all of the presidents. The admirable American Presidency Project offers an easily navigable source of transcripts from every State of the Union Address since George Washington’s first.

That ought to keep you busy. Have a great weekend!