Wilson: Interactive visualization of U.S. federal e-petitions

In November 2012 Chris Wilson of Yahoo News posted an interactive visualization of the e-petitions submitted on the U.S. federal government’s We the People e-petition site.

According to Eric Mill of the Sunlight Foundation, Wilson’s crawler for retrieving the petitions and their metadata is now part of the github.com/unitedstates/ project, specifically located at https://github.com/unitedstates/petitions

The github.com/unitedstates/ project is an open government data repository developed by Eric, Dr. Joshua Tauberer of GovTrack, and Derek Willis of The New York Times.

We the People is located at https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/

For more information on the github.com/unitedstates/ project, click here and here.

HT @WHWeb

Mill: Sunlight Foundation releases Congress API

Eric Mill of the Sunlight Foundation points us to Sunlight Congress API released yesterday.

Here is a description:

A live JSON API for the people and work of Congress, provided by the Sunlight Foundation.

Features

Lots of features and data for members of Congress:

• Look up legislators by location or by zip code.
• Official Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook accounts.
• Committees and subcommittees in Congress, including memberships and rankings.

We also provide Congress’ daily work:

• All introduced bills in the House and Senate, and what occurs to them (updated daily).
• Full text search over bills, with powerful Lucene-based query syntax.
• Real time notice of votes, floor activity, and committee hearings, and when bills are scheduled for debate.

All data is served in JSON, and requires a Sunlight API key. An API key is free to register and has no usage limits.

We have an API mailing list, and can be found on Twitter at @sunlightlabs. Bugs and feature requests can be made on Github Issues. [...]

About the source of the bill data, Eric says:

it’s built on the github.com/unitedstates work that GovTrack and Sunlight and others created, which ultimately comes from THOMAS.

He adds:

there’s a mix of other (documented) official sources too. One of the API’s purposes is to connect and de-silo information.

For more details, please see the Sunlight Congress API site.

For more information on the github.com/unitedstates repository, which was co-developed by Eric, Dr. Joshua Tauberer of GovTrack, and Derek Willis of the New York Times, please see the post entitled New Congressional Data Available for Free Bulk Download: Bill Data 1973- , Members 1789-

HT @konklone

New Congressional Data Available for Free Bulk Download: Bill Data 1973- , Members 1789-

Two new free and open sources of bulk data about the U.S. Congress have been created by Eric Mill of Sunlight Foundation, Dr. Joshua Tauberer of GovTrack, and Derek Willis of the New York Times, and posted on GitHub:

• Congressional bill data, 1973 to present, scraped from THOMAS
• “Every bill has a JSON file, data.json, with fields related to a bill’s ID, status, names, sponsorship, amendments, and history.”

• congress-legislators: Data about Members of the United States Congress, 1789-Present, in YAML:
• Data come from several sources. “Each legislator record is grouped into four guaranteed parts: id’s which relate the record to other databases, name information (first, last, etc.), biographical information (birthday, gender), and terms served in Congress.”

• congress scrapers:
• The code of the scrapers used to harvest the data.

HT @konklone: https://twitter.com/konklone/status/254239001840603136, https://twitter.com/konklone/status/254239600854306816, https://twitter.com/konklone/status/254239829104136192

Video and Other Resources Available for House Legislative Data and Transparency Conference

Video is now available for the House Legislative Data and Transparency Conference, held 2 February 2012, in Washington, DC. The conference was hosted by the U.S. House of Representatives’ Committee on House Administration.

Click here for slides from some of the presentations (scroll down).

The Twitter hashtag for the conference was #ldtc.

Presentations concerned metadata and dissemination standards and practices for U.S. federal legislative data, including open government data standards, XML markup, integrating multimedia resources into legislative data, and standards for evaluating the transparency of U.S. federal legislative data.

Speakers included Daniel Bennett of the e-Citizen Foundation, Tom Bruce of the Legal Information Institute, Daniel Schuman and Eric Mill of the Sunlight Foundation, Jim Harper of the Cato Institute, Joshua Tauberer of POPVOX and GovTrack, and Derek Willis of the New York Times.

Here are links to selected posts about the conference:

• Jim Harper, Helping the House Advance Data Transparency
• Ari Hershowitz, Roundup: House Legislative Data and Transparency
• David Moore, Liberate OpenGovData Now
• Daniel Schuman, Benchmarks for Measuring Success for Legislative Transparency
• Joshua Tauberer, Data Impact and Understandability (click here for slides)
• Derek Willis, On Legislative Data Transparency
• John Wonderlich, Bulk Data at the House Legislative Data Conference

If you know of other posts or resources about the conference, please feel free to mention them in the comments.

{NOTE: Updated 11 February 2012 to add link to Joshua Tauberer’s presentation.]