California and the Republican Party and the conservative movement. Youre fortunate in utah to have a strong base of conservativism. We do not have that in california. I was wondering, for republicans and conservatives like us, can you comment on how we might able to regain the state and bring it back to the reagan days . As to the second question, i am only two states away, so i am happy to provide you with some conservative representation in washington. It turns out that your two senators are not conservative. I dont know if you knew that. [laughter] we do occasionally agree on things. I think it leaves not only me, but also the rest of us wondering if something has gone terribly wrong when we vote on the same thing. I think it relates back to the question that we asked a minute ago. The fact we have to do a better job explaining not just what we are against, there is always a place for that, but what we are for. Just as importantly, why we are for it. We are not just about tearing down bad government, not just about cutting out that government, but producing good government. What we are trying to achieve at the end of the day. What it is that we want is a society in which everyone, including americas poor and middleclass, a society in which they will have an opportunity to get ahead, to work hard for him and to better their station in life. I think that message will work in california and everywhere as we learn how to express what it is we really want. The best thing we can do with regard to russia and ukraine, involves really aggressive production of oil and natural gas. [applause] i am a member of the Senate Armed Services committee. I recently asked some very highranking military officers whether that would make a huge difference, and they agreed emphatically, yes it would make a huge difference. Because Vladimir Putin would never have dared do what he did if we were aggressively producing and exporting oil and natural gas. He would never have gotten away with it. Economic sanctions, we have to go there. In order for them to matter, in order for any of this to matter, we need to be the worlds leading energy producer. [applause] one more. It seems like every day we are up against the media, up against democrats, up against a great deal of our own party republicans. Can you speak to some of the successes the conservative movement has had lately . [laughter] how about another question . [laughter] first of all, the mere fact that were talking credibly about the possibility of obtaining the majority in the senate, the mere fact that we can talk with some credibility to the possibility of pushing forward some of these incremental reforms that ive mentioned a few minutes ago, all of that was made possible only because of a phenomenon that started to be recognized in 2009 and 2010. Spontaneous grassroots conservative waves that hit the country. Not everyone knew what to call that. I just call it a return to americanism. It is what strengthened our weak position in the senate, and is the only reason why we could be looking seriously at the possibility of having majority of both houses. To get there we have to recognize that there is some natural tension that is in any political party. Not just an hours, but in any. Tension between the base and the senior leadership, the elected officials within that party. That tension will always exist. And right now it has created a hole in the Republican Party. The way to bridge that hole is an affirmative agenda that talks about what it is but we want, that nearly all republicans can get behind, it is the only way we can get there and unite the party. It is what reagan would have us do, and it is what reagan did. [applause] thank you. A couple of live events from the heritage foundation. The look of philanthropy on defense funding. That is live tomorrow on cspan. On u. S. Relations with asia later on the day between japan and south korea. The former director of National Take part inwill the discussion. Live coverage at 2 00 eastern on cspan. Cspan presents debates on what makes america great. Evolution and economically modified moods. Oversight, student loan date and Sexual Assault on onpuses new perspectives Global Warming and fighting Infectious Diseases and food ur. Ety and the history to he find the tv schedule one week it event at www. Cspan. Org www. Cspan. Org and let us know what you think. Call us. Or email us at comments cspan. Org. Like us on facebook and follow us on twitter. Discussion about congressional transparency next and the use of internet site wikipedia. Panelists to talk about the efforts and challenges posed on posting wikipedia about congress. The interdigital followed this onehour event. Thank you for coming. Is the peoplee most knowledgeable about the bills have an aversion to this. People who were upset with wikipedia the people who work are members, work with crs largely not editing the website at that a large segment of the American Population uses to get information about hills pending in congress. Hugeve the potential for a manner in which government can deliver transparency to the public and the public and likewise can demand their outcomes. To help navigate the roles a littleikipedia and history on the legislation, we have three dollars here jim harper is the senior fellow and works with privacy and intellectual property and transparency and security. 2014, he was the director at cato. In 2014, he was the senior fellow of the bitcoin foundation. Michelle, she is a legislative researcher and writer. She has a bachelor degrees in political silence and and mass degree in International Relations is from the university of staccato university of chicago. 1392 unique mazes. She has created 900 articles come most of which are about legislation. We have jim hayes who is a member of wikipedia d. C. We will turn it over to jim. Thank you for being here. I am pleased to have the cspan audience because i think we will talk about some interesting stuff today. Advance thelot to ball in transparency and congress. Issues are very interesting wikipedia editing with Congressional Staff a version on capitol hill and there is an distrust within the wikipedia community. With work and care i think we can improve that. I want to open by doing a brief history, the sort of modern history of the transparency issue him and the work we have been doing at cato, before i turn it over to michelle and then jim. Michelle obviously has the numbers to prove that she can make a talented and capable wikipedia and we want to make others as good as michelle at producing information for people together to get insight into what people are into what is happening inside congress. What is going on within transparency . Ive been working on it longer. Since 2000, i run a website called washingtonwatch. Com. It has had a lot of traffic. 200,000 comments on a single bill come a for example. Really impressive stuff. But really, the transparency project has never taken off like a good command that is basically because the data is not available. I was excited when president obama was first elected with the promises of transparency that he made. Goodfaith promises, and i think a goodfaith effort was made within the first couple of years of the Obama Administration to deliver on transparency. But i think a problem existed, and that is, people did not early no how to deliver transparency. This people did not really know how to deliver transparency. What is been spared the within the government . How does it deliver on the oversight that we want for the public today echo today . I have seen a slowdown in the transparency efforts during the Current Administration also and i wrote a couple of pieces that are available, and i think they are available on the desk outside. What do you have to do with the asked on the transparency side . What we want them to be doing to provide transparent data. It has to be available from an authoritative voice, so be below where to get it. Availability, and completeness. That is, you want all of the relevant data in a given area. You want it to be up all the time come and to stay in one place of there can be a consistent datastream and website asked and Information Services can be built on a datastream that is reliable. Of course, the machine for searching is important. Google and other crawlers need to be able to find the data and deliver it to people. And the most important parties readability. Structuring the most important part is readability. Structuring the data so that it is usable. A subsequent publication is called grading the public grading the governments availability of public practices, grading the legislative process, the budget and appropriations process. The grades are generally fairly poor. There have been steps taken in the congress and in the administration in and in a new law recently passed called the did act that may well improve those great those grades quite a bit. In a study we are about to commence, again, regrading the availability of data, the numbers will still be fairly poor. Actual data about what is going on in congress is not readily available. Actual data about the budgeting is not readily available. But over the years, we have set to work at cato trying to make some of that work available that Data Available for sub you can follow our work on these bills on twitter. Cato. Org Resources Data is where the data is downloadable in bulk, or through the api. What we do is gather versions of the bill from the Government Printing office, and then using highly software highly customized software, we add xml that indicates when there is a reference to an existing law in all of the ways that reference might exist. When it is referencing a bureau, we have the data automatically available for those who want to parse and find it. We have a bill when we have a bill that contained spending, or an authorization of appropriations, or an appropriation, we also make that available as data. The publishing of these bills and making them available for anyone to use, and the did the data that we are starting to seize, for example, the Washington Examiner has a page called appropriate appropriations. They are displaying to their users the existence of the bill proposed to spend money. A few months ago when this came out, this was the first time anyone could systematically find what ails in Congress Proposed to spend taxpayer dollars. It is surprising and fascinating that there was no systematic way of learning when congress was proposing spending. But the appropriate appropriations page on the Washington Examiner uses that data within these bills to make that available to the public, positioning for better oversight of the congress. The New York Times is a better user of this data. You do tracking of legislation, votes, and such. On pages about legislation there, there is a section in the lower right called mentions. They use the references that we have to show what agencies are mentioning what bills. If you are interested in what is happening at the department of labor, or the Environmental Protection agency, the data we produce allows you to see all of the bills that affect these agencies. When i mentioned that it references existing law, that is another thing we mark up in all the ways that robert refers to them. The Legal Institute at cornell has begun using this data to let their visitors know that when they are visiting a page of the u. S. Code, that code is subject to amendment by the u. S. Congress. We have relatively sophisticated people going onto the cornell law website and many of you here are filling with that and many people out of the land are familiar with that. It is usually the top searchers when you are searching for u. S. Code. When you are on one of those pages and the section of code you are looking for is up for amendment in congress, they are giving you a link to that. You can go to congress. Gov and look at the bill must find out who authored it, and where it is in the process. Look at the bill, find out who authored it, and where it is in the process. That will be Important Information for those who are looking for the code and the legislation that is pending. They may be able to offer educated opinions on what congress is doing an improved democratic processes. We at cato are also using the data on wikipedia. I come now to the subject of todays topic. We take the data that is produced in deep bills and we produce info boxes that we use on legislative pages. Youre probably familiar with the info boxes on wikipedia about a movie star, political actor, what their party has been in their career, and so on and so forth. Wikipedia info boxes can show any discrete way what is going on with a particular bill. Those are produced with deep bill data as well. And to sort of highlight what is going on with wikipedia now, we have created a twitter bot that is a riff on the congress at its twitter boxed. Congress recently came out with a great deal of interest in this. It tracks anonymous edits coming from capitol hill. There has been a little bit of backandforth and forth between one or more anonymous editors, and the cutie at large, because the Community Seems to be trolling the edits that they do. It is interesting stuff. Someone edited them i believe, the Cato Institute page on wikipedia anonymously on the hill about this event happening. It was kind of metaand we saw our minds a coating when that happened. It tracks all edits, not just those coming from the hill. You can see the bot at wiki bills. You can see what legislation is being edited. You can take a look at what people are doing with bills and find those there. Many of the edits are coming from michelle, who does so much work. We are trying to make government more legible. We are trying to make it more available. Editing wikipedia is a way of doing that. Getting the notable bills up there, getting them written about, so people when they are doing a search to find out what is going on in congress can go to that resource, which is so valuable for so many things. And at least start their investigation there. As john mentioned, there has been reticence on the congressional side to wikipedia, and that has to do with history early on. There was controversy, because people from the hill, people from Congressional Offices were going in and editing the pages of the members of congress that they work for. There would be back and forth and there were conflicts of interest in doing that. Generally, there is. There is a version to wikipedia editing on the hill. There is suspicion of wikipedia editing from the hill on the part of the wikipedia community. But we think that suspicion can be abated, if not gotten rid of them entirely. But it will be hard. There are customs and rules on wikipedia against rules against conflict of interest, for cabell, but i think have to be navigated very carefully. Michelle is going to for example, but i think they have to be navigated very carefully. Michelle is going to talk about this culture. She is very highly decorated within wikipedia. Im very pleased with her work. Her experience of the culture is an experience that others have had. Theres a lot of controversy that goes into these bills. We will have more discussion around what the rules are and how to navigate the process. We very much like to see Congressional Offices flipped from a version to embrace wikipedia. After a sort of initial phase of concern and worry and suspicion, i think things will change dramatically and wikipedians will come to expect that the mers of congress are sharing with the public in the best possible way ways to introduce congressional legislation. The question is, which will which Congressional Office will step up and start editing wikipedia first check on unofficial banana, but shes here to talk about her experience. Wikipedia first. I dont know if michelle will talk about that, but shes here to talk about her experience. In march, 2013, we had a meet up with wikipedians and the transparency activists within d. C. And sat down to talk about how we can use the deep bill data that jim just described in a way to make the wikipedia boxes on wikipedia better. And improve the discussion. One of the things we discussed that day was how we determine if a piece of legislation is notable. Obviously, the person who introduces it hopes that it is notable. They put it there for a reason. But with 10,000 pieces of legislation in a congress, we cannot really do with the pd articles on all 10,000. One of the lines that we decided on at this meeting and have held to is that pieces of legislation are notable if they come up for a floor vote in the house and senate. That is several hundred bills so far in this congress. And we have articles about 350 of them. Obviously, there are many more that we do not have articles about. One of the things ive noticed as i do this, is that you can track to hit count an article gets, and you can track exactly who the editors are of an article. I can tell you that when we write an article, posted out there, put it in the article people read it will stop people read it. Especially bills like immigration bill, farm bill, those get attention. If you search for the bill name, your article is up on the first page of the google hit. People can find it and they use would be as a source of information. They will go there and read the article. The problem is, once you put the article up there, there are some hardcore wikipedians they come by and do some maintenance on the article. Very little Additional Information gets added. That is what we would like to see people on the hill do. You guys know more about these pieces of legislation than anyone does. You have personal and professional interest in their being correct there being wrecked information for the general public in the bill and why the information is good or bad or terrible and how it can be improved. You have incentive to add to these articles. What wikipedia can provide is, one, a knowledge of the rules, and the culture of wikipedia. How to maintain neu