After more than four years of work from volunteers and a full-time team here at Sunlight we're immensely proud to launch the full Open States site with searchable legislative data for all 50 states, D.C. and Puerto Rico. Open States is the only comprehensive database of activities from all state capitols that makes it easy to find your state lawmaker, review their votes, search for legislation, track bills and much more.

If you're interested in your state lawmaker, you'll be able to get notifications for their actions, a map of their district, voting records, committee assignments, campaign finance records from Influence Explorer, local news articles and contact information. If you're curious about a particular piece of legislation, Open States allows you to check on its status, find the sponsors, break down votes, view bill text and all supporting documents. Our powerful search capabilities allow you to find similar topics across states and view overview pages for each state, chamber and committee.

Each state's website has different quirks and the process of collecting and scraping legislative data into one unified, reliable and machine-readable format was a long challenging process. Here's a brief video about the story behind Open States:

To get started visit OpenStates.org and enter any U.S. address, browse a state from the drop-down or enter a term you're interested in into the search box in the top right corner. For a more thorough walkthrough of the site, please join us for a free training webinar on Friday, February 22nd from 1-2pm.

Legislative information is also available for previous and special sessions, making Open States an important archive of data that often disappears when a new session begins or a new state website is unveiled. The archives will vary from state to state based on when we scraped their sites and how much information they display.

Open States also has a companion iPhone and iPad app to easily browse the data on the go. All the data seen in Open States is available through our API or by bulk download and the code is open sourced and available on GitHub here. If you are interested in contributing to the project, feel free to join the Open States google group here. Some notable uses of Open States data includes NPR's StateImpact project and this visualization from MinnPost.com.

The Open States project would not be possible without the help of our volunteers and the generous financial support from the Rita Allen Foundation, Minnesota Historical Society and Open Society Foundations.

The Sunlight Foundation’s legislative branch agenda for the 113th Congress is sweeping and comprehensive, but if Congress is committed to transparency, many of Sunlight’s recommendations can be quickly adopted. Sunlight’s legislative recommendations to improve transparency fall into three broad areas: Lobbying, Money in Politics, and Government Data. For each item, a one-page description is available on our website.

Lobbying Transparency

Congress should adopt comprehensive lobbying reform to require real time online disclosure of lobbyists’ activities. The Lobbyist Disclosure Enhancement Act would ensure that those who are paid to lobby register as lobbyists and would create more transparency around lobbyists’ interactions with Members of Congress.

The Lobbying Disclosure Act should also be amended to require registration and reporting by “political intelligence” firms that specialize in gathering nonpublic information from Hill sources in order to enrich investors and manipulate stock markets.

The Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) should be amended so that detailed information about foreign lobbying is available online, in real time, in a searchable, sortable, downloadable database.

Money in Politics

Greater transparency of money in politics is vital to restore accountability and trust in our democratic institutions. Congress should eliminate dark money’s influence on elections by passing a version of the DISCLOSE Act. Legislation requiring disclosure of corporate political expenditures by publicly held companies would also shine a light on much of the dark money infecting our elections.

The 2012 election demonstrated that presidential candidates can not be counted on to voluntarily disclose information about who is giving to their campaigns. Legislation requiring disclosure of presidential bundlers, as well as candidates’ tax returns would provide voters with insight into potential conflicts of interests and executive branch influencers.

The Senate should, at long last, pass legislation requiring senate candidates to electronically file their campaign finance reports.

Government Data

A number of previously introduced pieces of legislation would dramatically increase openness of government data. Congress should pass the Public Online Information Act (POIA), to require Executive Branch agencies to publish all publicly available information on the Internet in a timely fashion and in user-friendly formats.

The Access to Congressionally Mandated Reports Act (ACMRA) would make agency reports more accessible to the public. Legislation to ensure the public has access to Congressional Research Service (CRS) reports would also ensure valuable, objective reports are publicly available.

As fiscal cliff negotiations continue, it is clear that federal spending transparency is sorely deficient. The Digital Accountability and Transparency Act (DATA) would establish an open and accountable system for tracking every dollar that the federal government spends.

As the 113th Congress begins, we hope new and old members will commit to making transparency a top agenda item.

Earlier this year, Connecticut Governor Dannel Malloy (D) signed a bill that would require that all state regulations be posted online. Once the law goes into full effect, Connecticut will join almost every other state and the District of Columbia in making their regulations freely accessible on the internet. Only one state, Massachusetts, requires interested parties to pay for access to this vital information.

Inspired by Connecticut’s decision, we decided to do a survey of the online accessibility of state regulations. Our research identified whether regulations could be accessed through the web, whether or not the state provides downloadable versions of these regulations and which states require their proposed rules and regulations to be posted online. We also tracked if these requirements translate into actually online publishing and the amount of time that proposed rules have to be available for public review before they go into effect. You can find the full results of our research -- and links to each state’s relevant law -- on our research page.

The results were surprising: We were pleased to find that so many states have procedures for making their regulations available online, though our research made it very clear that there are no consistent best practices. Many states fail to provide their regulations in downloadable formats, almost none provide bulk data downloads, a few insist on charging fees for access, and others make their codes difficult to browse. Some states post their code online, but fail to provide notice of proposed changes.

A look at the landscape

Massachusetts currently makes their regulations harder to access than any other state, requiring an annual subscription fee of $110 to access the state’s regulation database. Their system could be well designed, easy to use and provide bulk data downloads, but it is impossible to tell without registering and paying for the service.

The barriers created by other states are less overt, and likely the product of a limited understanding of the different ways in which people need to access electronic information. For example, West Virginia, the District of Columbia, Florida, Louisiana and Maine allow users to search and browse the titles of regulations online through their browser, but require downloads to access the full text -- an innocuous, but real obstruction to interacting with this public information. To its credit, South Carolina provides both HTML (browser accessible) and downloadable versions of its regulations, but the downloadable data is only available in DOCX -- a closed, proprietary format.

On the flip side, 16 states do not allow for any downloads of their data. Three others-- California, Maryland and Montana -- allow downloads, but only after charging various, often exorbitant, fees. This kind of restriction plays on privilege, limiting the access of those members of the public who want to study these documents when not connected to the Internet or who lack the financial resources to purchase these records.

Finally, it’s worth noting that not a single state provides bulk data downloads in an ideal manner. Most states that offer something like bulk access hide their regulations behind user fees, though there are a few exceptions. Kansas has released its 2011 regulations as a single PDF (which, while not awful, is certainly not ideal), and Delaware , taking a more creative (if perplexing) approach, makes its regulations available via a cornucopia of eBook formats.

Next steps

Once Connecticut's new law goes into effect, only three states -- Georgia, Massachusetts, and South Carolina -- will fail to post proposed rule changes online via their state registers.

The fact that states are publishing their regulations online at all is a great step towards broadening public access to this information, but there is plenty of room for improvement. In the coming weeks we will take a look at how the Federal government deals with this issue and dig deeper into this research to identify more specific recommendations for states.

To check out the results of our survey, head here: http://www.opencongress.org/wiki/State_Regulations_Online

Policy Intern Hunter Main provided research and contributed to writing this piece.