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

Jaquith launches Open Virginia data portal, providing access to legal data

Waldo Jaquith today launched Open Virginia, an open data platform for the U.S. state of Virginia.

Open Virginia is built with the CKAN open source data portal software.

Here is a description of Open Virginia:

Open Virginia is an effort to document the open government data published about the Commonwealth of Virginia—APIs, bulk downloads, and links to third-party data sources that provide much-needed information about how our government works.

Open Virginia currently offers access to legal data, including:

• the state’s legislative code
• code sections affected by bills 2006-
• a list of Virginia Court of Appeals decisions that cite a given law
• data on members of the state legislature

HT @shevski

Glassmeyer: Electronic Legal Copyright, Citation, and Preservation Information Integrated with Open States Legislative Data Report Card

Sarah Glassmeyer, JD, MLS, of CALI, has posted a spreadsheet that integrates the Open States Open Legislative Data Report Card ratings with the National Inventory of Legal Materials (NILM).

The NILM, compiled by the American Association of Law Libraries, lists data about each U.S. state’s online legal materials regarding copyright assertion, authentication, preservation, official status, permanent public access, uniform citation, and enactment of the Uniform Electronic Legal Material Act.

For more information on the NILM, please see:

• Emily Feltren‘s December 2012 AALL Washington Blawg post, Update on the National Inventory of Legal Materials
• Emily Feltren and Tina S. Ching‘s February 2012 VoxPopuLII post, Protecting Access One Entry at a Time: An Update on the National Inventory of Legal Materials.

HT @sglassmeyer

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

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.]

New Zealand statutes on GitHub

I just learned that developer Brenda Wallace has posted many New Zealand statutes to GitHub.

The statutes appear to have been posted in 2010, and it’s unclear whether they have been updated since.

This repository is another example of GitLaw.

HT @legify_law

Sheridan on Legislation as Data

John Sheridan of the National Archives gave a presentation entitled Legislation as Data, 25 January 2013, at the Open Data Institute in London.

Click here for the presentation slides.

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

The Twitter hashtag for the event was #odifridays

For posts about the presentation, please see the comments to this post.

HT @JeniT

[NOTE: Updated 31 January 2013 to add a link to the slides.]

Aaron

A thought about Aaron Swartz:

One of Aaron’s principles was “data to the people.” So when you work to make data publicly available — as many members of the legal informatics community do — you honor Aaron.

Mill: U.S. House of Representatives floor proceedings in bulk XML

Eric Mill of the Sunlight Foundation points us to a new legislative bulk data resource: U.S. House of Representatives’ floor proceedings in bulk XML, 2005 to present (also called House Floor Activities Download).

The announcement of the availability of these data, by the Speaker of the House, states that this is the first project of the new Legislative Branch Bulk Data Task Force.