Code Swaraj
the second session of the Congress and a brand new era of progress under the dynamic leadership of their boss. I told them they'd be featured on every local TV station in the country if they brough high-resolution video directly into the newsrooms of America. I called it a public-private partnership, said it was a win-win situation.
While in the office, I mentioned as an aside to the Speaker’s staff that the House Broadcast Studio had sent me all of Congress by mistake. It was a surprise to them since they thought I was working on a single committee. I suggested that since we had no formal operating agreement on this subject and because the data was works of government and in the public domain, that perhaps nobody would have any objection if I posted this data. I left them the photographs of the rack I had built for them and lots of detailed charts and tables about the system.
Well, turf is a funny thing. The Library of Congress has an extensive (and expensive) audio-video facility they built in Virginia. The House has an extensive staff in the broadcast studio and in the administrative bureaucracy. The Library staff felt very strongly that all this was their job and that they were going to have done this eventually. Or were going to do so well once they actually started doing it. In any case, it was clear they didn’t want me doing it.
So, they cut me off at the knees. Congressman Lungren, Chairman of the Committee on House Administration, issued an order saying I was to have no more data. The Library installed a really cheesy low-bandwidth streaming solution and took great pains not to make the full archive publicly available. It was better than what they were doing previously, which was nothing, but it was still pretty bad. I was out of business, stuck with a bunch of hardware, which ended up in the local e-cycling facility at the local dump six years later. What a waste.
The most surreal moment was when I found myself meeting with lawyers for the Committee on House Administration. They whipped out a piece of paper, an agreement saying I could use the data I had already obtained but only if I got the permission of each Committee Chairman before releasing that Committee’s video. They wanted me to sign the agreement. I refused.
My 14,000 hours of video now lives on the Internet Archive and I was able to go through the video and have found metadata for 6,390 hearings. I also posted all my exchange of email and letters with the House, including the silly agreement that I didn't sign.
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