Last week, the office of the Chicago city clerk expanded its online records of the City Council, posting Journals of Proceedings going back to 1981 (previously only the last few years had been available) as well as city budgets and executive orders for the same period. Also new is a Google custom search across the PDFs of the Journals. The old days of crawling around the basement of City Hall searching for ordinances is a thing of the past, crowed the press release [pdf].

This is an interesting, fairly encouraging step. More encouraging are the future plans del Valle discussed with Chicago Talks:

When he was a member of the Illinois General Assembly, del Valle used the Springfield bill tracking system , which allows users to easily search and download information about state legislative activities, such as amendments and roll call votes, within hours of being filed.

"I was spoiled; I thought this is the way it is everywhere," del Valle said of the system in Springfield. He hopes to implement a similar database for the City of Chicago soon.

The office is awaiting approval of $600,000 from the Information Technology Governance Board. That money will be used to create the document management system, said Deputy Director of the City Clerk's office Jay Rowell. This system would mimic the legislative tracker in Springfield that follows bills as they move throughout the law-making process.

These plans are consistent with (and, in some ways, go further than), the recommendations from del Valle's Modernization Task Force, from whose report [pdf] I hope you'll excuse my quoting at some length:

One of the chief responsibilities of the City Clerk's office is to maintain official records of city government, including publishing the Journal of Proceedings of the Chicago City Council. To ensure that city government is open and responsive in order to best serve the residents of Chicago, the City Clerk should implement the following reforms to increase the transparency of City Council legislation and actions.

Findings:

• Council Committee reports/agendas are not readily available to the public.
• City Council rules are also not easily accessible to the public, limiting the public's understanding of how the City Council functions.
• Records of City Council action can be difficult to find.
• The Municipal code is difficult to access.
• The public cannot easily track ordinances pending before the council.
• Although the City Clerk accepts citizen ordinances for introduction to the Council, it is not an easily accessible process.
• Residents of Chicago do not have easy access to live recordings of City Council meetings.
• It is difficult to search the archives of the Journal of Proceedings.

Specific Recommendations:

• The City Council Rules, in a printable format, should be posted on the City Clerk's website.
• The City Clerk's website should contain a link to the Legislative Reference Bureau, and explain that this is the source for all roll call vote information.
• The entire Municipal Code should be posted on the City Clerk's website, or there should be a link to the Code from the Law Department's site.
• The City Clerk should post on his website a spreadsheet detailing the status of all pending ordinances, which includes their committee assignments, status, and summary.
• The City Clerk should provide an online process for accepting citizen ordinances.
• Podcasts of current and past City Council meetings should be available for the public to download.
• All ordinances should be required to keep the same number throughout the legislative process.
• Each Council item should be given a name and a title so that they can be easily searched for and tracked.
• The City Clerk should contract with a search engine so that online users can search the full archives of the Journal of Proceedings.

The Illinois General Assembly site to which del Valle refers is somewhat interesting, not least in that there's an FTP site from which you can download much of the underlying data directly. But so far, the clerk seems unwilling to emulate Springfield in this regard, preferring to build interfaces to data which it keeps to itself.

Here's what that means: the city decides how you get to use what are, under state law, public records. It decides what criteria may be used to search, sort, or filter them. It decides what what is important about them and what is not. Want to see the aldermen ranked by, say, how frequently they vote with the mayor? Good luck. Moreover, the clerk's office, after spending $600,000 in special appropriations to implement a legislative tracking system, is not likely to have the funds or in-house expertise to maintain it properly over the next several years. I'm guessing we'll see it stagnate until it's as hopelessly obsolete as the current site is today, at which point we'll get to start all over again.

Let's call this the THOMAS approach:

The Internet's transformative political potential has been clear to astute nontechnical observers since at least the mid-1990s but progress toward that transformation has been sporadic at best. In January of 1995, when the Republicans regained a Congressional majority, they launched THOMAS, a web site that details every bill in Congress. But by 2004, the site was so badly out of date that seven senators, including John McCain, cosponsored a resolution to urge the Library of Congress to modernize it.

...

Meanwhile, private actors have demonstrated a remarkably strong desire and ability to make government data more available and useful for citizens--often by going to great lengths to reassemble data that government bodies already possess but decline to share. Govtrack.us integrates information about bill text, floor speeches and votes for both houses of Congress by painstakingly reprocessing tens of thousands of webpages. It was created by a graduate student in linguistics in his spare time.

That's from Government Data and the Invisible Hand, a recent paper by David Robinson, Harlan Yu, William Zeller, and Ed Felten that's been making the rounds online and will appear shortly in the Yale Journal of Law and Technology. Its argument: we should require that federal websites themselves use the same open systems for accessing the underlying data as they make available to the public at large.. Governments love to spend money on expensive websites to which they can point as accomplishments (an API is not sexy, except perhaps to outliers like you and I, and it is not the stuff of which breathless press releases are made), but it's the data that's interesting — and one interface (whether created by public or private parties) will of necessity only expose a certain facet of the whole.

What does this mean in the context of Miguel del Valle and the City Council? It means that the ordinances submitted to the clerk in an electronic format (Corel WordPerfect, I'm told, is the office's word processing software of choice) should be publicly available in that format — not as PDFs created from images created from the originals, supplemented by an OCR text layer filled with errors and lacking all the additional formatting and metadata present in the WordPerfect document (remember "show codes," from back when word processing software used to suck less?), which is what you'll see if you check the clerk's site today.

It also means that when the clerk does build his legislative tracking system (and he should, the present criticism notwithstanding), we should get a documented, public API into the underlying database, or, failing that, regular data dumps in some standard, open format. It means not buying some contractor's proprietary system [pdf, marketingese] which hides the data behind limiting interfaces and undocumented internal APIs to closed databases.

I'm not optimistic. The office's claims to transparency as a goal are belied by its denial of my request for the City Council records in their original form (I'll be posting copies of my request and the response shortly), revealing a too-typical kneejerk disinclination on its part to share any information it hasn't absolutely got to (though I believe it does, under the state FOIA, have such an obligation in this case — again, more later) even when that information is entirely innocuous.