The federal government must be spending some of its budget surplus on Web-site design, because the Internet makes it almost too simple to find out what our national lawmakers are up to. A sift through the sites of state and local governments, however, reveals wide differences in the information each provides and the ease of getting to that information. Ingram's Magazine decided to take a stroll through the World Wide Web to find the government sites most useful for tracking the legislation that affects our lives. The U.S. House of Representatives packs volumes onto its Web site. Included is a record of how your representatives voted.
Local sites do a better job of showing what has happened rather than what's happening.
The archive lists the activities of the council and its different committees for almost a year. Total vote counts are reported, but not the vote of individual council members. The least user-friendly sites are the county sites. All of the Web sites provide some information about the people whom we have elected to govern us. And, from the largest tax bill to the smallest zoning ordinance, a stroll through the government sites on the World Wide Web give one a sense that we are looking at the history of the future.