POIA: The Public Online Information Act

I was so impressed when I received the following email from my congressman, Steve Israel regarding POIA: The Public Online Information Act. For those of you unfamiliar with POIA, in the age of the Internet, government is transparent only when public information is available online. The Public Online Information Act (POIA) is legislation, introduced by Rep. Israel, that embraces a new formula for transparency: public equals online. No longer will antiquated government disclosure practices bury public information in out-of-the-way offices and in outmoded formats.

POIA requires Executive Branch agencies to publish all publicly available information on the Internet in a timely fashion and in user-friendly formats. It also creates an advisory committee to help develop government-wide Internet publication policies.

After reading this email I contact Congressman Israel’s office and we are trying to arrange a time for him to speak to our group in NYC in the next few months…so stay tuned.

Dear Bill,

Do you know what happens to public government documents after the government is done using them? Even though this information is supposed to be public, most of the time it is locked away in a warehouse and never made easily accessible. To me, that’s about as transparent as a nuclear missile silo.

This week I introduced legislation that will redefine “public” – the Public Online Information Act. My bill will require that all executive branch agencies make their public documents easily available online in a timely fashion and in user-friendly formats. Additionally, each government agency will be required to create a searchable catalog of all disclosed public documents, and an advisory committee will be created to help develop government-wide Internet publication policies. People across the country – from scholars to schoolchildren – will be able to see any public executive branch documents from the convenience of their computer.

For more information on the Public Online Information Act, you can visit my website at http://israel.house.gov.