Mill on Scout, Free Access to Law, and Open Legal Data

Eric Mill of the Sunlight Foundation has posted the text of his presentation on tracking government information and open legal data, given 26 April 2013 at the AzALL Congressional Information Symposium, in Phoenix, Arizona, USA.

Here is the introduction to the presentation:

I recently got a chance to go speak to a group of Arizona law librarians about legal informatics [...]

They found me because of Scout, and asked me to talk about tracking government information. I decided to start with Scout as an example, to zoom out to similar projects [GovTrack and CourtListener] , and then to describe the conditions necessary to make projects like ours possible. Because the audience was law librarians, a sympathetic crowd inside an unsympathetic area of government, I emphasized the necessity of absolutely free access to data as a fundamental requirement and right. [...]

For more details, please see the complete post.

HT @konklone

Bill Summaries at GovTrack

Dr. Joshua Tauberer‘s GovTrack free access to law and e-participation service now includes summaries of selected legislation, according to Dr. Aviad Eilam‘s post entitled Update: Adding Bill Summaries, at GovTrack Blog.

Here is an excerpt of the post:

Here at GovTrack we’ve gotten a fair amount of complaints about wordy, incomprehensible legislative language. So we’ve started doing our own research on certain bills, in an effort to provide simple and straightforward explanations of their content and purpose. These are bills that have gotten a lot of coverage in the press and social media, have many of our users tracking them, or have piqued our interest. Oftentimes, they have all three features.

Here’s a list of the bills we’ve summarized so far, ordered by the number of users tracking them:

H.J.Res. 15: A bill to repeal presidential term limits
S. 150, H.R. 437: Assault Weapons Ban of 2013
H.R. 138, S. 33: Large Capacity Ammunition Feeding Device Act
H.R. 142, S. 35: Stop Online Ammunition Sales Act of 2013
H.R. 21: NRA Members’ Gun Safety Act of 2013
H.R. 141: Gun Show Loophole Closing Act of 2013
H.R. 193: Seed Availability and Competition Act of 2013
S. 22: Gun Show Background Check Act of 2013 [...]

For more details, please see the complete post.

HT @freegovinfo

Videos of Legal Information-related Presentations at Kick-starting the 113th Congress Conference

Click here for videos of legal information-related presentations at the Kick-starting the 113th Congress Conference, an event of the Advisory Committee on Transparency, held 28 January 2013 at the U.S. Congress’s Rayburn House Office Building, Washington, DC.

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

Tauberer: New GovTrack Bill Prognosis Methodology Page, with Charts

Dr. Joshua Tauberer has created a new bill prognosis methodology page for GovTrack, his U.S. federal open legislative data service.

The page includes (on right screen) three tabs of charts demonstrating output and functioning of the prognosis methodology. The third tab shows charts of precision vs. recall results, and is intended expressly “for machine learning researchers.”

HT @JoshData

Public access to law-related data @ Kick-starting the 113th Congress Conference

Public access to law-related data is likely to be addressed at Kick-starting the 113th Congress, an event of the Advisory Committee on Transparency, to be held 28 January 2013 at the U.S. Congress’s Rayburn House Office Building, Washington, DC.

Public access to legal data is likely to be addressed by at least two speakers at the conference:

• Jeremy Miller, Esq., of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics: [video of presentation:] Expanding Access to OLC
• Jeremy Miller, Esq., of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics: [video of presentation:] Make CRS Reports Public
• Stephen J. Schultze of Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy: [video of presentation:] Open PACER
• Dr. Joshua Tauberer of GovTrack: [video of presentation:] Hire a Transparency Director
• Dr. Harlan Yu of Robinson + Yu LLC: [video of presentation:] Making Law Easier to Understand

Click here for videos of many of the presentations at the conference.

Click here for more information on speakers, or to RSVP.

For videos of presentations and reports on the conference, please see the comments to this post.

HT @govtrack

[NOTE: Updated 2 February 2013 to list Jeremy Miller's and Harlan Yu's presentations and to link to video.]

Tauberer: Changes to GovTrack Bill Prognosis

Dr. Joshua Tauberer of GovTrack has posted Bill prognosis gets a few improvements, at the GovTrack Blog.

He writes:

…I’m adding three new factors to GovTrack’s analysis: whether the bill was introduced in the first 90 days of the Congress, whether it was introduced in the first year, and whether it was introduced in the last 90 days of the Congress. You can now see that last one in the factors for S. 3637, for example.

The post describes his decision to incorporate a component of the model described in: Yano et al.: Textual Predictors of Bill Survival in Congressional Committees.

For more details please see the complete post.

HT @JoshData

Yano et al.: Textual Predictors of Bill Survival in Congressional Committees

Tae Yano and Professor Dr. Noah A. Smith, both of Carnegie Mellon University Language Technologies Institute, and Professor Dr. John D. Wilkerson of the University of Washington Deaprtment of Political Science, presented a paper entitled Textual Predictors of Bill Survival in Congressional Committees, at New Directions in Analyzing Text as Data 2012, a conference held 5-6 October 2012 at the Harvard University Institute for Quantitative Social Science.

Here is the abstract:

A U.S. Congressional bill is a textual artifact that must pass through a series of hurdles to become a law. In this paper, we focus on one of the most precarious and least understood stages in a bill’s life: its consideration, behind closed doors, by a Congressional committee. We construct predictive models of whether a bill will survive committee, starting with a strong, novel baseline that uses features of the bill’s sponsor and the committee it is referred to. We augment the model with information from the contents of bills, comparing different hypotheses about how a committee decides a bill’s fate. These models give significant reductions in prediction error and highlight the importance of bill substance in explanations of policy-making and agenda-setting.

A notable technology related to this research is the new probability-of-bill-passage feature on Dr. Joshua Tauberer’s GovTrack service.

Click here for Dr. Tauberer’s comment on the Yano et al. paper.

An interesting discussion among academics and developers arose on Twitter in response to a tweet about this paper.

Ruby Wrapper for GovTrack API

Noah Litvin announced last week that he has written “an unofficial Ruby wrapper for the GovTrack API“.

GovTrack is Dr. Joshua Tauberer‘s free and open legislative data and e-participation service for U.S. federal legislation.

The readme for the Ruby wrapper includes several examples.

Click here for the GovTrack API.

HT @noahlitvin and @govtrack.

Digital Legal Documents from Yale Law School and GovTrack Cited in Recent Historical Scholarship, New Study Shows

Digital legal documents published by Yale Law School’s Avalon Project and Dr. Joshua Tauberer‘s GovTrack open legislative data system are among the archival digital collections cited in recently published historical literature, according to Professor Dr. Donghee Sinn, Impact of digital archival collections on historical research, Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology (JASIST), 63, 1521–1537 (2012).

Here is the abstract:

A number of digital projects have been implemented for archival and special collections. The amount of funds and effort devoted to such projects is enormous, and now they are providing greater opportunities and convenience for researchers to view and make use of important, rare, and/or brittle historical materials. However, little attention has been paid in the information science field as to how much impact these projects to digitalize archival collections have had on actual historical research publications. Existing studies are largely devoted to system designs and the user/usability interface, as well as users’ search behaviors. Little has been done to determine the direct relationship between digital resources and historical research. This study surveyed research articles in the field of history to observe how frequently and widely digital collections were used, what kinds of digital collections were used more extensively and for what purposes, and what the current status of digital archival collections among other resources is in historical research. Citations and figures in articles of the American Historical Review for the period 2001–2010 were analyzed with a specific focus on digital archives collection. The usage patterns by material types and formats of references and the impacts of digital archival collections among other sources are identified from two perspectives of impact: intensity and extensity. Observation of the direct relationships with digital collections and historical studies suggest some practical guidelines for future digital projects with concrete data.

Yale Law School’s Avalon Project and GovTrack were the only sources of legal information identified in the study.