May 22: House Legislative Data and Transparency Conference 2013

The U.S. House of Representatives will hold its second Legislative Data and Transparency Conference, 22 May 2013, in Washington, DC.

Click here for the conference agenda.

Click here for live video of the conference.

The Twitter hashtag for the conference is #ldtc

Click here for archived Twitter tweets from the conference, in .csv format.

Here is an excerpt from Daniel Schuman’s description of the event:

The House of Representatives will hold its second annual Legislative Data and Transparency Conference on Wednesday, May 22, in the Capitol Visitor Center Auditorium. Last year’s conference was a tremendous success, bringing together the government insiders that create and publish legislative data with the public that consumes and reuses the information. Here’s video from the 2012 conference.

The 2013 conference is expected to address the “use and future of legislative data,” and will cover topics including electronic legislative archiving, XML and metadata standards, and updates on beta.congress.gov. Of course, like last year, the most important part of the conference will be the conversations that take place among the participants. The House’s leadership deserves real credit for holding the conference and inviting the public to participate.

Like last year, this year’s all-day event is open to the public. [...]

Dr. Joshua Tauberer tells us: “I’ll be formally introducing my #OpenGovData Maturity Model at the conference.”

After the conference, several organizations presenting at the conference, including the Sunlight Foundation, will hold a happy hour, for which you can RSVP here.

HT @danielschuman

Schuman on GPO’s New and Improved U.S. Statutes at Large, with Bulk Metadata in MODS

Daniel Schuman, Esq., of the Sunlight Foundation, has posted GPO is Closing Gap on Public Access to Law at JCP’s Direction, But Much Work Remains, on the Sunlight Foundation Blog.

The post describes the U.S. Government Printing Office’s making available United States Statutes at Large, 1951-2009, with full text for individual statutes in PDF and .txt formats, and for entire volumes in PDF format, and metadata for individual statutes and in bulk for each volume in MODS format.

For example, click here for bulk metadata for volume 123 of U.S. Statutes at Large, in MODS format.

Here are excerpts from the post:

The GPO’s recent electronic publication of all legislation enacted by Congress from 1951-2009 is noteworthy for several reasons. It makes available nearly 40 years of lawmaking that wasn’t previously available online from any official source, narrowing part of a much larger information gap. It meets one of three long-standing directives from Congress’s Joint Committee on Printing regarding public access to important legislative information. And it has published the information in a way that provides a platform for third-party providers to cleverly make use of the information. While more work is still needed to make important legislative information available to the public, this online release is a useful step in the right direction. [...]

In mid-January 2013, GPO published approximately 32,000 individual documents, along with descriptive metadata, including all bills enacted into law, joint concurrent resolutions that passed both chambers of Congress, and presidential proclamations from 1951-2009. The documents have traditionally been published in print in volumes known as the “Statutes at Large,” which commonly contain all the materials issued during a calendar year. [...]‘

The online release of the Statutes at Large from 1951 forward, accompanied by good quality metadata, has made it possible for the public to see important (and not so important) legislation. [...] Of course, the major New Deal legislation, such as the Securities and Exchange Act of 1934, and anything from the last quarter of the 19th century, is still unavailable from GPO. And GPO/LOC still hasn’t incorporated the information it has released onto THOMAS. However, the free legislative information portal GovTrack already jumped in with both feet, incorporating this information on its website where users can easily search and find historical bills going back to 1951.

Depending on the quality of the searchable PDFs GPO has posted, it may also be just a matter of time before someone pull out the text from the PDFs and puts it into a database, too. That would improve the ability to search for bills and facilitate analysis of congressional activities. It also moves us one step closer to a very difficult but important goal: allowing people to see in real time how draft legislation would amend the law. For that to be possible, GPO would need to publish the Statutes at Large from prior to 1951 online in electronic form, including making clear the underlying structure of the statutes, plus there’d have to be some pretty significant advances in the tools available to parse legislative language. [...]

For more details, please see the complete post.

Schuman: U.S. House Convenes Second Public Meeting on Legislative Bulk Data

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.

Schuman: Finland Experiments With Citizen-Introduced Legislation

Daniel Schuman, Esq., of the Sunlight Foundation has posted Finland Experiments With Citizen-Introduced Legislation, at the Sunlight Foundation Blog.

The post describes Finland’s new Open Ministry e-petition system and compares it to e-petition systems in the U.S. and Germany.

Click here for ather information about Open Ministry.

HT @EllnMllr

Congress.gov: New Official Source of U.S. Federal Legislative Information

The U.S. Congress has launched a new official legislative information system for the U.S. federal government: Congress.gov.

According to Alex Howard of O’Reilly:

[...] the new Congress.gov features responsive design, adapting to desktop, tablet or smartphone screens. It’s also search-centric, with Boolean search and, in an acknowledgement that most of its visitors show up looking for information, puts a search field front and center in the interface. The site includes member profiles for U.S. Senators and Representatives, with associated legislative work. In a nod to a mainstay of social media and media websites, the new Congress.gov also has a “most viewed bills” list that lets visitors see at a glance what laws or proposals are gathering interest online. (You can download a fact sheet on all the changes as a PDF).

Click here for Alex’s complete post about Congress.gov.

Daniel Schuman of the Sunlight Foundation observes that Congress.gov does not provide “for public comment on the design process [or] computer-friendly bulk access to the underlying data.”

Daniel, Tom Bruce of the Legal Information Institute, and others have recently written recommendations to Congress about providing public bulk access to congressional data.

Tom and his team have been consulting with the Library of Congress on their legislative metadata, and Congress.gov appears to reflect their work. Tom describes this new approach to legislative metadata approach in a series of posts here.

Kim Nayyer of the University of Victoria Law Library has also written about Congress.gov at Slaw.ca.

Nick Judd and Miranda Neubauer have written a post about Congress.gov at TechPresident: What Congress.gov Means for a Congressional API.

Bruce, Mill, Schuman, Tauberer & Wonderlich: Recommendations on Public Access to Legislative Data

Tom Bruce of the Legal Information Institute; Daniel Schuman, Eric Mill, and John Wonderlich, all of the Sunlight Foundation; and Dr. Joshua Tauberer of GovTrack and POPVOX, have posted a new report entitled On Public Access to Legislative Information: Recommendations to the Bulk Data Task Force (2012).

The report “provides a roadmap” that the U.S. Congress’s Bulk Data Task Force can use “to implement[]” free public “bulk access to” the THOMAS database of U.S. federal legislative information.

The report is a product of the effort — known as #freeTHOMAS — to provide free online public access in bulk to THOMAS.

For more information, please see Daniel’s post entitled How to #FreeTHOMAS: A report on implementing bulk access.

HT @danielschuman

Schuman on Law Libraries, Government Transparency, and the Internet

Daniel Schuman of the Sunlight Foundation has posted Law Libraries, Government Transparency, and the Internet on the Sunlight Foundation Blog.

Here is a description of the post:

This past weekend I was fortunate to attend the American Association of Law Libraries 105th annual conference. On Sunday morning, I gave a presentation to a special interest section entitled “Law Libraries, Government Transparency, and the Internet,” where I discussed the important role that law libraries can play in making the government more open and transparent.

After the talk, there were many requests for copies of my slides, so I’m publishing them here. [...] I’m also happy to make available the underlying files.

Schuman on the Delay in Publishing the Current Version of the U.S. Constitution Annotated

Daniel Schuman of the Sunlight Foundation has posted After 578 Days, Where’s the Constitution Annotated? on the Sunlight Foundation Blog.

In this post Mr. Schuman decries the unexplained 14-month delay in making the current version of The Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation (also known as The Constitution Annotated or CONAN) — Congress’s official treatise on U.S. constitutional law — publicly available on the Web, free of charge, in XML.

A PDF version of The Constitution Annotated is published on the U.S. Government Printing Office’s FDsys Website, but this version is disfavored because (a) the PDF format is unsuited to information reuse, and (b) the FDsys version is very difficult to process because it consists of a 2002 base volume plus four supplements, each of which must be consulted separately. By contrast, the “master version” of The Constitution Annotated is in XML format, and is said to be current and integrated in a single edition without supplements.

In his post Mr. Schuman offers numerous reasons — including reducing Congressional printing costs, increasing the public’s knowledge of U.S. constitutional law, and fostering innovation — for publishing The Constitution Annotated in XML on the free Web. Mr. Schuman refers to additional arguments expressed in a 2010 letter signed by more than 20 organizations advocating free Web access in XML to The Constitution Annotated.

For more information, please see the Sunlight Foundation’s earlier posts on this issue.

Schuman on Parliamentary Monitoring Organizations

Daniel Schuman of the Sunlight Foundation has posted Questions from Paris on PMOs, on the Sunlight Foundation Blog.

In this post Mr. Schuman comments on the development of an international network of parliamentary monitoring organizations, in light of the recent conferences — Open Legislative Data in Paris: A Conference of the Third Kind with Hacktivists and Academics, held 6-7 July 2012; and the International Meeting: Achieving Greater Transparency in Legislatures thru Open Document Standards, held 27-29 February 2012 in Washington, DC — and the drafting of a Declaration on Parliamentary Openness.

In his post Mr. Schuman reflects on the principles and values informing and motivating parliamentary monitoring organizations, the internal dynamics within such organizations, and the challenge of making such organizations sustainable.

For more information, please see the complete post.

For more information about Open Legislative Data in Paris: A Conference of the Third Kind with Hacktivists and Academics, click here.

For more information about the International Meeting: Achieving Greater Transparency in Legislatures thru Open Document Standards, click here.

July 6-7, 2012: Open Legislative Data in Paris: A Conference of the Third Kind with Hacktivists and Academics

Open Legislative Data in Paris: A Conference of the Third Kind with Hacktivists and Academics, is being held 6-7 July 2012, at Sciences Po, Paris, France.

[To see details about the conference, click here, and then, on the menu bar, cursor over "Conference / Conférence".]

Click here for the conference program.

Click here for archived Twitter tweets from the conference, in .csv format.

The Twitter hashtag for the conference is #oldp.

Click here for livestream of the conference.

Click here for collaborative notes from the conference.

The conference is sponsored by Regards Citoyens, Centre d’études européennes Sciences Po, and Le médialab Sciences Po.