Your window into the 112th Congress

Just after Representative John Boehner was sworn in as the 61st Speaker of the House earlier today, he and new House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa made an early move to make the activities of the House of Representatives more accessible to citizens via YouTube. Starting in this 112th Congress, all committee hearings of the House Oversight committee will be available on YouTube, on a new channel called HouseResourceOrg. This is the first congressional committee to ever put all of its hearings online, and the new Speaker hopes it’s the first step towards getting all House committee hearings available to all citizens on the web.

This was made possible via a Google Project 10^100 grant made to Carl Malamud at PublicResource.org, who will be working with the House to access and upload all of the hearings that the Oversight Committee holds each week. PublicResource.org will also upload hundreds of hours of archived content. Where transcripts are available from the House, they'll be uploaded along with the videos, using YouTube's auto-timing capabilities to automatically create accurate captions through voice recognition. Thanks to the reuse of these uploaded transcripts, PublicResource.org videos with captions will be fully searchable, and the captions can be auto-translated into over 50 languages.

Here’s an example of the types of videos you’ll see on the new channel – if you go to the video page, you can see the interactive transcript in the upper-right hand corner of the clip:

As always, you can access the individual channels of Members of Congress at youtube.com/househub and youtube.com/senatehub.