Sunlight Foundation’s Open Legislative Data Report Card

Sunlight Foundation has made publicly available its OpenStates Legislative Data Report Card, which grades U.S. states on how their “legislatures make their data publicly available.”

James Turk describes the service in a new post entitled Open States: Transparency Report Card, at Sunlight Foundation Blog.

Here is an excerpt:

[...] How could we derive a measure of how “open” a state’s legislative data was?

After some consideration, we came up with six criteria on which each state could be evaluated, based on six of the Ten Principles for Opening Up Government Information: completeness, timeliness, machine readability, use of commonly owned standards and permanence. We omitted four of the original ten criteria (primacy, non-discrimination, licensing and usage costs) that tended not to present serious differences between states.

Evaluating each state on each criteria was a large task, and with community support we ensured that each state was evaluated by multiple people. After the evaluation was complete, we converted the qualitative data on how a state performed to numeric scores (specific scoring details are available on the report card itself). After summing these scores, states were also assigned a letter grade according to where they fell among their peers. A state with a net score below negative one was given an F, a negative one or zero became a D. With the average total score among states being a 1.5, we gave states with a net score of one or two a C, three became a B, and four and above became an A.

The final breakdown was 8 As, 12 Bs, 20 Cs, 6 Ds, and 6 Fs. If you’re interested in how your state did compared to others you can check out all the details on the Open Legislative Data Report Card. [...]

For more details, please see the complete post.

HT @lizbart

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

Wonderlich on Legislative Collaboration and Version Control

John Wonderlich of the Sunlight Foundation has an interesting new post entitled On Legislative Collaboration and Version Control, at the Sunlight Foundation Blog.

He writes:

Proponents of applying version control systems to law have a powerful vision: a bill or law, with its history laid bare and its sections precisely broken out, and real names attached prominently to each one. Why shouldn’t we able to have that? And since version control systems are helpful to the point of absolute necessity in any collaborative software effort, why wouldn’t Congress employ such an approach?

When people first happen upon this idea, their reaction tends to fall into two camps, which I’ll refer to as triumphalist and dismissive. [...]

The Sunlight Foundation‘s approach can probably be described as qualified triumphalism. [...]

Click here for recent developments concerning legislative version control, including the topic known as GitLaw.

Click here for a list of legislative crowdsourcing projects in the U.S., compiled by OpenCongress, that John cites in the post.

HT @EllnMllr

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 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.