Washington, DC — The U.S. Congress is facing an information overload: elected leaders and their staffs have an overwhelming amount of information at their fingertips but severely lack a rigorous process to come up with unbiased facts. A new report from the New America Foundation’s Smart Congress pilot project within its Open Technology Institute [OTI] provides case studies of initiatives in the U.S.

Here in the United States and around the world, elected leaders seem paralyzed by information overload. Despite a wealth of information at our fingertips, high- quality, unbiased facts have become increasingly hidden in our noisy, saturated world. Worse, much of the public discourse has become routinely gridlocked, as proponents on each side of a debate regularly come to the table armed with their own “facts.” Faced with this deluge of information, the role of congressional staffers is increasingly one of fact-checking rather than fact-finding.

...There has yet been no freak-out in the public interest community about Wheeler—who lobbied for the cable and cell phone industries when they were upstarts, not behemoths. But a number of women's groups sent Obama a letter requesting he choose a woman for the job. (No woman has ever served as FCC chief.) Sascha Meinrath, director of the New America Foundation's Open Technology Institute, is one advocate who has slammed the prospective Wheeler pick, observing that Wheeler...

Washington, DC —  On Friday, March 22, the current chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, Julius Genachowski, announced that he will step down from the post.
 
The following statement can be attributed to the Open Technology Institute: