Suhaka: Average and median word counts of legislative bills in the 50 U.S. states, with maps

Karen Suhaka of LegiNation has posted How long is too long? Not long enough? Just right?, at BillTrack50 Political Eye Candy.

The post shows mean, median, and maximum word counts for legislative bills in the 50 U.S. states, with maps.

Ms. Sukaha describes her method for producing the word-count statistics and maps as follows:

I use a commercial mapping package. The counts are just done in SQL, since I’ve parsed all the bills into XML.

HT @BillTrack50 (here and here) and @Smoodle

Suhaka and Tauberer on Business Models for Reuse of Open Legislative Data

Karen Suhaka of LegiNation and Dr. Joshua Tauberer of GovTrack gave a “lightning talk” presentation entitled Legislative Transparency: A Round Up of Efforts and Results to Date (featuring this GoogleDoc spreadsheet on Open Gov Business Models) at IOGDC 2012 Virtual Conference: International Open Government Data Conference, 7 July 2012.

Part of the presentation concerned descriptions and examples of several different business models for using or reusing legislative and other government data. The legislative examples included:

• BillTrack50 (an example of the “Freemium” business model)
• GovTrack (“Advertising”)
• LexisNexis (“Pay services”)
• POPVOX (“Startup”)
• Sunlight Foundation (“Nonprofit”)
• THOMAS (“Government”)

The authors invite you to contribute additional business models and examples of use and reuse of open government data, to their GoogleDoc spreadsheet.

HT @Smoodle.

Vergottini on BillTrack 50: All 50 States Legislation in a Common Format

Grant Vergottini of Xcential Group has posted Imagine All 50 States Legislation in a Common Format, at his Legix.info blog.

In this post, Mr. Vergottini discusses BillTrack50, a new U.S. state-level bill tracking service developed by Karen Suhaka of LegiNation. BillTrack50 provides access to pending legislative bills — in a common XML format, Mr. Vergottini’s SLIM XML format — for all U.S. state legislatures. BillTrack50 charges a fee for access.

For more information, please see the complete post.