"If the Senate passes the bill with the provision intact, citizens seeking information about Congress' activities—such as bill names and numbers, amendments, votes, and committee reports—won't have to rely on government websites, which often filter information, are incomplete, or are difficult to use. Instead, the underlying data will be available to anyone who wants to build a superior site or tool to sift through it. "The language is groundbreaking in that it supports providing unfiltered legislative information to the public," says Honda's online communications director, Rob Pierson. "Instead of silo-ing the information, and only allowing access through a limited web form, access to the raw data will make it easier for people to learn what their government is doing." 

"John Wonderlich, the policy director at the Sunlight Foundation, which has created or funded several tools that make government data easier to analyze, is holding out hope that the president's Open Government Directive, which is due at the end of May, will further address the issue of data availability. He applauds Honda for putting Congress, at least, on the right track. "Without Honda's attention to this issue, congressional level attention to bulk data access would be unlikely," he says. "We're happy to see this first step."