Here's one reason Congress seems so unresponsive. It's a small example of the bureaucratic hurdles in bringing Congress into the 21st century, and it is frustrating younger staffers to no end.
Hey all,
I am sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but my boss sits on the Franking Commission, and two weeks ago we had a meeting about this very topic. As current policy stands, you cannot embed YouTube videos on your website - currently, 100+ offices are doing it anyways, and they are in violation of the House Administration Committee's rules. The Committee is currently in the process of deciding how to handle the offices that are not in compliance with the rules as they relate to YouTube specifically.
While YouTube is the easiest way to get videos on your website, the only permissible means of posting videos is by using House resources (for more information, contact webassistace@mail.house.gov).
If you have any other questions about the issue, feel free to pitch them at me. The meeting that took place a few weeks ago was a riot in the sense that half of the Members there had no idea what YouTube, MySpace, or many of the other popular websites.
[name withheld]
Hey all,
I'm trying to figure out whether or not it is kosher to use YouTube to embed videos onto your website.
Web solutions says that they have never heard of YouTube not being allowed, but then I also heard that a web page with an embedding Youtube clip would not be approved by franking.
My goal is have Youtube videos (floor / committee proceedings mostly) on our front page.
If anyone has any input on this that would be awesome. Sorry for the mass email!
[name withheld]
The Franking Commission is a kafka-esque agency that tends to want to see all communication before approving it, which is precisely the opposite of the web. There are lots of interesting problems here but basically the situation is a mess and prevents members from communicating on forums, over video, and on many sites across the internet. It's as if someone sat down and said: "Let's create the most powerful and important set of public spaces imaginable, and then make sure members and Senators can't use them."
Transparency is going to be a key theme of the next twenty years of politics regardless of who comes into Congress and the White House. I did some work on The Open House Project to deal with problems like this, which are natural and not really anyone's fault, since we really are at a revolutionary moment.
If you want to see what the future might look like once we get through these problems, check out PublicMarkup.org. It's a mix of wiki, blog, and committee hearing, and the subject is transparency. I expect to see a huge number of bills take this form in the next few years and bring in untold and unimaginable power for citizens as we learn to group around policy decisions, but we're going to have to deal with bureaucratic obstacles like the Franking rules as we go. For longtime OpenLeft readers, PublicMarkup.org is the equivalent of Legislation 2.0, a discussion we did on OpenLeft and Redstate about broadband policy.
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