Daniel Schuman, Esq., of the Sunlight Foundation has posted House Convenes Second Public Meeting on Legislative Bulk Data, at the Sunlight Foundation Blog.
Here is an excerpt:
On January 30th, the House of Representatives held a public meeting on its efforts to release more legislative information to the public in ways that facilitate its reuse. This was the second meeting hosted by the Bulk Data Task Force where members of the public were included; it began privately meeting in September 2012. (Sunlight and others made a presentation at a meeting, in October, on providing bulk access to legislative data.) This public meeting, organized by the Clerk’s office, is a welcome manifestation of the consensus of political leaders of both parties in the House that now is the time to push Congress’ legislative information sharing technology into the 21st century. In other words, it’s time to open up Congress.
The meeting featured three presentations on ongoing initiatives, allowed for robust Q&A, and highlighted improvements expected to be rolled out of the next few months. In addition, the House recorded the presentations and has made the video available to the public. The ongoing initiatives are the release of bill text bulk data by GPO, the addition of committee information for docs.house.gov, and the release of floor summary bulk data. It’s expected that these public meetings will continue at least as frequently as once per quarter, or more often when prompted by new releases of information. [...]
The Bulk Data Task Force was formed in part in response to the #freeTHOMAS movement. That movement seeks free public bulk access to the contents of the THOMAS U.S. federal legislative database, which is gradually being superseded by a new database called Congress.gov.
For more details, please see Daniel’s complete post.
