OpenGov Voices: Creating an Early Warning System for Political Activism

by guest author Adam Green

April 19, 2013, 12:45 p.m.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed by the guest blogger and those providing comments are theirs alone and do not reflect the opinions of the Sunlight Foundation or any employee thereof. Sunlight Foundation is not responsible for the accuracy of any of the information within the guest blog. Adam Green

Adam Green is the CTO of UniteBlue.com -- a social network for progressives based on Twitter. UniteBlue connects and organizes political activists on a national and state level. You can reach. Adam at adam@uniteblue.com.

One of the great challenges for political activism in each of the 50 state legislatures is providing timely information on bills as they move through the legislative process. The data provided by the Sunlight Foundation Open States API is comprehensive, but combing through it to find the limited number of bills that activists have the time to focus on can be overwhelming. I have found over 88,000 bills in the current session alone. We are now developing an early warning system at UniteBlue.com that can assist our volunteers in filtering this information flow down to a manageable level.

While the entire process will take months to complete, in this guest post I’d like to propose a triage model that can be used as a first step. Triage is the medical model used in hospital emergency rooms and during disaster responses. A high flow of patients is screened using certain “signatures” to determine which ones need to be seen first, such as blocked airways or dangerous vital signs. The process of triaging the high flow of bills coming from the Sunlight data will follow a similar model.

Open States: Transparency Report Card

by James Turk

March 11, 2013, 10:10 a.m.

Today we’re making available our Transparency Report Card, a byproduct of the work we did in producing Open States.

In the course of writing scrapers for all 50 state legislatures, our Open States team and volunteers spent a lot of time looking at state legislative websites and struggling with the often inadequate information made available. Impossibly difficult to navigate sites, information going missing and gnarly PDFs of tabular data have become daily occurrences for those of us working on Open States. People are always curious to know how their state stacked up compared to others -- in fact one of the most frequent questions we have been asked has been “so which state was the worst?” That question got us thinking: 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, ease of access, 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, 11 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.

We know first-hand from our ongoing dialogue with state legislatures and open government technologists that identifying these commonplace problems can go a long way toward addressing them. In that spirit, and in the spirit of Sunshine Week, we offer this report card and recommendations today.

Open States: Find and Follow Your State Capitol

by Nicko Margolies

Feb. 14, 2013, 10:20 a.m.

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.

Gun Control and Gun Rights: Legislation, Policy and Influence

by Liz Bartolomeo

Dec. 17, 2012, 1:27 p.m.

The tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary has brought gun policy back to the forefront of our national conversation. As a nonpartisan, nonprofit Sunlight takes no stance on the issue, but we have put together a collection of resources looking at the legislation, policy and influence around gun rights and gun control, plus the groups and lawmakers involved.

The Gun Lobby

Sunlight Foundation Senior Fellow Lee Drutman reviews the political influence of the National Rifle Association and the leading gun control group, the Brady Campaign to End Gun Violence. Read his full analysis in this blog post.

Lee notes that when it comes to the debate on gun policy, Congress is pretty much only hearing from one side. The NRA spends 66 times what the Brady Campaign spends on lobbying, and 4,143 times what the Brady Campaign spends on campaign contributions. Since 2011, the NRA spent at least $24.28 million: $16.83 million through its political action committee, plus $7.45 million through its affiliated Institute for Legislative Action.

According to Influence Explorer records, the Brady Campaign spent $5,800 this election cycle and reported $60,000 in lobbying costs.

The 12 Days of APIs

by Liz Bartolomeo

Dec. 3, 2012, 2:12 p.m.

‘Tis the season for application programming interfaces. Sunlight is in a festive mood. Not only are we hosting a pretty rad open house this week, but we have the perfect present for the open data developer in your life: a Sunlight Labs API key!

Here are our “12 days of APIs,” with a few bulk data sets thrown in to round it out. No singing required! Be sure to also check out some new additions and better accessibility we’ll have available in 2013.

12 minutes spent researching our API offerings on Sunlight Academy, which includes a brief tutorial video.

11 television markets reported more than 1,500 political ad filings this election. Download data about who bought more than $3 billion in political ads in 2012 from Political Ad Sleuth.

10 methods provided in the Sunlight Congress API. Our most popular API includes basic information on members of Congress, legislator IDs and lookups between places and the politicians that represent them.

9 political races had more than $20 million in outside spending this election. Download the bulk data on the money spent by super PACs, unions, corporations, nonprofits and other groups this cycle at Follow the Unlimited Money.

8 data sets covered by the Influence Explorer API (neé TransparencyData), which includes federal and state campaign contributions, federal lobbying, government grants and contracts, EPA violations, federal regulations and more.

7 collections presented in the Real Time Congress API. Get as close to real-time data as possible on bills, votes, amendments, videos, floor updates, committee hearings and documents.

6 standard arguments to query in the Capitol Words API. Search the Capitol Record since 1996 and filter your results by state, party, chamber, date, start date or end date.

5(0) states available in the Open States API, which also covers D.C. and Puerto Rico. Use the RESTful API or bulk download to access the only comprehensive collection of state legislative data in the U.S.

4 ways to get Political Party Time data. Use the JSON feed, CSV file, RSS feed or relational zip file to know when politicians are fundraising and who is hosting the events.

3 mobile apps powered by our APIs: Real Time Congress for iPhone, Congress for Android and OpenStates for iPhone and iPad. (And check out Call on Congress if you don’t have a smartphone.)

2 options to get Scout alerts, by email or via text message. Scout uses a variety of Sunlight APIs—Capitol Words, Real Time Congress and Open States—to deliver real-time policy alerts on state and national issues, as well as has special user option for developers.

And a listserv to follow what’s happening in Sunlight Labs.

Flickr photo of partridge in a pear tree light display by K. van Santen.

Open States: Present and Future

by Tom Lee

Feb. 15, 2011, 4:59 p.m.

Open States map @ 25 I'm pleased to say that Caitlin and James have just finished giving our Open States project a lovely new design. Not only is the site now much more pleasing to look at, it's much easier to see the great progress that's being made by James, Mike and our volunteer contributors. In addition to the five states that are live (and supported by OpenGovernment), there are already another twelve states with "experimental" status. Don't let the scare-quotes scare you, though: while we wouldn't yet recommend building your air traffic control system or pacemaker firmware in such a way that it's dependent on our API coverage of Alaska, the scrapers from the experimental states are well on their way to being declared complete. Developers should confident about building around this data -- rest assured that it'll be declared "ready" soon enough.

Of course, we hope that developers in our community will also consider becoming involved in the project directly -- there's plenty of work to be done.

And it's genuinely important work. State legislatures are where vital decisions are made about civil rights, transportation, education, taxes, land use, gun regulation, and a host of other issues. Far too often, these issues don't get the attention they deserve. It's a simple question of scale: there are a lot more resources available at the federal level for both lawmakers and journalists. That means state governance both requires more transparency and tends to get less of it. We think technology can help make the situation better -- that's what Open States is all about.

There are some interesting opportunities for cross-state work, too. Polisci geeks will probably appreciate the comparative politics opportunities that a common data model and API will allow (Gabriel Florit's already been creating some cool visualization experiments that build on our data). But there are also less academic applications for this information. Consider these two stories that NPR published last fall. They got a bit lost in the pre-election shuffle, but they made a big impression on me.

The gist of it is this: Arizona's controversial immigration law didn't happen by magic. One of the special interests fighting for it was the private prison lobby -- as you might imagine, having more prisoners means more business for them, and they saw increased enforcement of immigration laws as a growth opportunity. So, via an intermediary organization that specializes in this sort of thing, they conducted a legislator "education" campaign, wining and dining lawmakers and sending them home with prewritten model legislation.

All of this is perfectly legal. And, depending on your opinion about immigration, you might even approve of the policy outcome it produced. But it's hard to imagine anyone being okay with the shadowy role that commercial interests appear to have played in this legislative process. If we'd been able to spot the provenance of the legislation earlier, would journalists and organizers have been able to give the people of Arizona a more complete understanding of what was going on? I think so -- I hope so. That's the kind of use that Open States should make possible, and the one I'm most excited about.

OpenGovernment Is A Finalist For SXSW Accelerator

by Tom Lee

Jan. 27, 2011, 3:59 p.m.

We've been really pleased with the enthusiastic response that OpenGov has received since its launch. Today's brought one more bit of good news: the site's been named a finalist in the Accelerator competition of this year's SXSWi. You can find the full details over at the OG blog. Congratulations to David, Carl and the rest of the PPF team!

And while I've got you thinking about state legislative data, check out what Gabriel Florit's done to visualize data from Open States. It's very neat stuff, and a great early example of the kinds of things that we think the project will make possible.