House.Resource.Org

"For the past 5 years, I [Carl Malamud] have haunted the halls of the U.S. Congress with a geeky ask: broadcast-quality video from all congressional hearings should be posted on the Internet. I gave a tech talk at Google, drew up business plans (pdf) to start a new nonprofit, enlisted the help (pdf) of the Public Printer, and harassed my friends in the mainstream media and my friends working for the former Speaker (pdf). My motivation has been a deeply felt belief that one should not have to live inside the Washington, D.C. beltway in order to observe the proceedings of the U.S. Congress. No matter what our political beliefs, no matter how much we disagree on the issues, we must all agree that the business of the Congress is the business of the People....Today, we are announcing a new site, House.Resource.Org. This site contains today over 500 hearings we obtained from C-SPAN from the proceedings of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform....A letter received today from Chairman Darrell Issa and Speaker of the House John A. Boehner states that it is their hope “that this project is only the beginning of an effort to eventually bring all congressional committee video online.” ...We have two hacks that I think are fairly significant. First, copies of this data are being furnished on disk drives to the Office of House Preservation and the National Archives and Records Administration, officials of both organizations happily accepting this addition to our nation's permanent record. It is our hope that archivists, librarians, and historians will make good use of this material. The second hack is something we are doing that leverages some amazing work being done by the YouTube engineering team. In many cases, we've been able to take the video of a hearing and mash it up with the official GPO transcript...."