By Fred W. Weingarten
CRA Staff

House Speaker Newt Gingrich recently unveiled Thomas, the new congressional Internet access point to congressional information (http://thomas.loc.gov). The plan is for Thomas to provide access to the full text of bills and the Congressional Record, and eventually provide a much broader collection of information and services intended to bring citizens closer to the government.

However, Congress is not on the cutting edge--many other organizations have already developed a Web page. And much of what currently is on Thomas consists of Gopher services started by the previous Congress (but never expanded into anything useful).

The White House has had a Web page for several months (http://www.whitehouse.gov), as have, with strong encouragement from the president, most agencies. As with Thomas, most of these pages are incomplete.

Ironically, the newly discovered (by politicians) Internet grew out of federally funded R&D programs--mainly under the High-Performance Computing and Communications program--that appear to be at great risk this year from cuts by Congress.

Thomas as an example

Nevertheless, even in its current developmental state, Thomas shows how easily electronic access to legislative information can be made available. Useful as it is and will be, however, the page also illustrates the enormous gulf that exists between government as a provider, and citizens as users of information. Few people have the motivation or expertise to read full-text bills or time to peruse the Congressional Record. (The daily information output of Congress includes all deliberations on the floor of both houses, countless hearings, legislative and investigative committee reports and the studies and reports of all congressional agencies.)

Many difficult technological problems and deep political issues revolve around a simple question: "To what extent should (and can) government try to bridge that gulf?" Even for those who favor openness and access, the answer is not as easy as it seems. There are several issues that will be tough to resolve.

1) Cost has to be a barrier. It is not inexpensive to put huge amounts of information online, but it is becoming more feasible. After all, most data, even that destined for eventual printing, exists somewhere in electronic form. But many questions need to be answered first: How can data be formatted so it is easy to use? How easily can data be made searchable? Can a front-end interface be designed and maintained that can be understood and used by the average citizen? How should the scale problem be dealt with? (Anyone in the world may drop in to browse. Traffic growth rates on the Internet continue to be phenomenal, to the occasional discomfort and expense of providers of popular resources.)

Putting information online is not at the top of the priority list of most agencies, however much they give lip service to it. The duty to do so generally is not in their basic charter but is more often inferred as part of their broader public responsibility. Expensive services will be the first to go when budgets get tight. In Congress, for example, committee and administrative budgets and staffs have been severely cut. When the glamour wears off, will maintaining Thomas continue be a high priority for committee and individual office staff? And will all those promised ancillary services find their way onto the net?

2) Can government officials possibly understand the needs of the user communities they will be expected to serve? It is not that the officials are uninformed, but because the communities they are expected to serve are very diverse. Yet, as government providers, they must serve them all.

One advantage of commercial and non-profit, private-sector providers is that they serve particular groups--environmentalists, researchers, teachers, bankers or children. Each group has different interests and skills, and each will use the information in different ways. Is it feasible to think that Thomas, or any government system committed to serving everyone, could successfully bridge that gulf, even if the technical and financial resources were available?

3) A related issue that partly cuts along ideological lines is to what degree the government should be in the information marketplace in the first place, competing with private-sector information providers. The information industry is growing rapidly and becoming increasingly important to the economy and trade. One would not want government to unnecessarily impede that industry's growth without a compelling public purpose.

The right to know

However, government does have the responsibility to inform its citizens. Except when there are concerns about privacy or national security, people have the right to information collected by their government. That premise is spelled out in the Freedom of Information Act, which was passed when paper was still the dominant medium of information storage. Even private-sector information providers want open access to the government's raw data because they package it for resale. But they get nervous when government agencies "add value" and too aggressively start bridging the gap between user and provider.

4) A question that cuts to the basic relationship between government and the people is the degree to which it is proper for government to be the interpreter and filter of information it holds. Making information usable involves filtering and interpreting. As much as we love and deeply trust our government officials, do we really want to rely solely on them to interpret and filter information?

In January a minor flap occurred over the post of House historian. Whether the accusations made at the time about that person's political views were accurate or fair is not the point here. What is important is that for the first time, the personal views of a House historian were publicly debated.

Traditionally, the post has been unnoticed and unremarkable in its duties of primarily gathering, archiving and organizing House documents. But Gingrich said that he wanted the House historian to play a more active and publicly visible role in teaching people about Congress and "the history of the institution." When the job changed from that of archivist and cataloger to interpreter and communicator, the ideology of the person in the job became a politically sensitive issue.

Issues for the community

The issue of access to government information should heat up this year as the Internet continues to grow and as networking enthusiasts in the administration and Congress share their futurist visions. A number of government organizations will appear online. Congress will debate the role of the Government Printing Office (which some want to close down), possible amendments to the Freedom of Information Act, development of the new Government Information Locator Service and many other related policy issues. The debates will be relevant to the computing research community at many levels.

A great deal of research must be done and technology invented before these futuristic visions can be fully realized. This may be yet another time when the hype and the vision triggered by a splashy success such as Mosaic can result in a backlash after people's expectations hit the current limitations of technology.

The National Science Foundation's major digital library grants made last year under the HPCC program will begin to work on an agenda. Some research needs to be done in the social and cognitive sciences. We know little about how people will access and use information in an electronic environment, or what role the intermediary institutions will play in moderating that access.

The government has a particular responsibility in providing the scholarly community with access to research and technical information. As the principal supporter of research, government is, in a sense, the principal creator of an enormous information bank. Some of the agencies are just now getting around to the idea that part of their responsibility to support research entails giving the research community access to the information. As broader rules and systems are established to mediate access to government information, will these rules and systems fit or work well in the case of science and technology information?

Many organizations, schools, universities, research labs, libraries and technical societies are important intermediaries in flow of information in society. What roles will they play in the future? Will services offered by government agencies obviate the need for or change the nature of services provided by other organizations? Will government science agencies sit more squarely in the middle of the basic flow of scientific information, particularly in some data-heavy disciplines? Should they?

To the research community, access and other such information policy questions are issues that are far afield from the more direct matters of research budgets and agency funding priorities. But the issues are becoming increasingly central to the National Information Infrastructure debate. Just as the physics community became drawn into the broader defense and nuclear policy debates following World War II, so too will the computing community inevitably be drawn into these broader information questions.