The House of Representatives is showing off a preview of their new website, over at preview.house.gov. It features a brand... View Article
Continue readingThe New House.gov
The House of Representatives is showing off a preview of their new website, over at preview.house.gov. It features a brand new design, a modest expansion of available data, and more educational material for citizens about the House and its functions.
Continue readingCongress 3.0 for Android
If you have an Android phone (or tablet) and haven't checked out the Congress app for Android in a while, now is a good time to give it another look.
Today we're releasing version 3.0, which, in addition to a redesigned theme and layout, adds:
- Live updates from the House floor.
- Upcoming committee hearings in the House and Senate.
- Keyword search for bills (e.g. "health care", "deficit", "immigration")
- Details on any amendment that receives a vote.
The Real Time Congress API
Today we're making available the Real Time Congress API, a service we've been working on for several months, and will be continuing to expand.
The Real Time Congress API (RTC) is a RESTful API over the artifacts of Congress, kept up to date in as close to real time as possible. It consists of several live feeds of data, available in JSON or XML. These feeds are filterable and sortable and sliceable in all sorts of different ways, and you can read the docs to see how.
RTC replaces and deprecates the Drumbone API, which is no longer recommended for use.
Continue readingCongress App, Present and Future
I just published what will likely be the last update in 2010 for the Congress app for Android. It's a small update that asks upgrading users if they'd consider making a small donation to the Sunlight Foundation, if they've found the app useful.
You can donate through the Android Market by scanning the QR code to the right, or if you want to give more you can donate through the web.
2010 was a great year for the Congress app. Well over 300,000 people have downloaded the app, it's been well reviewed, has been a featured app in the Android Market, and has been featured by T-Mobile and Sprint in their respective channels. Over the course of 2010, we added comprehensive information about bills, voting history, and background notifications for just about everything in the app.
We plan on expanding the Congress app even further for the 112th Congress.
Continue readingPreview: Real Time Congress API
My main project for the last month or so has been something we're calling the Real Time Congress API. It's not quite ready for production use, and the data in it is subject to change, but I wanted to give you all a preview of what's coming, and to ask for your help and ideas.
The goal of the Real Time Congress (RTC) API is to provide a current, RESTful API over all the artifacts of Congress, updated in as close to real time as possible. For the first version, we plan to include data about bills, votes, legislative and policy documents, committee schedules, updates from the House and Senate floor, and accompanying floor video.
Continue readingLabs Olympics: Sunlight 2D
Recently, the Labs broke into teams and spent two days doing projects entirely of our own devising, given free rein. Our team consisted of two developers, a designer, and Sunlight's prized sysadmin. So for our project, we wanted to do something for the office, that blended software and design with the physical world. Inspired by some recent internal work in inventorying items using QR codes, we thought it'd be fun to make a system that lets Sunlighters print out QR codes for anything they wanted.
What people do with those codes is up to them - document internal events for posterity, lead coworkers on a scavenger hunt, plant jokes, write QR slam poetry, whatever. The design goal here was to make it dirt easy, through their computer's browser or their mobile phone, for a Sunlighter to print out a QR code with some text and/or a picture attached.
Continue readingThe Drumbone API
On our new API homepage, we recently added the Drumbone API. It's a light, flexible, JSON-only API over Congressional legislator, bill, and vote data, and we currently use it in two of our products. I wanted to take a minute and explain why we built this, especially in the face of the existing suite of community sources for this data.
Continue readingExplore the House’s Expenditures
We've updated our House disbursement data to include a "bioguide ID" for each row pertaining to a legislator's office. For more information on why we did that, and how you can use it, read on.
Some of you may know that the House began posting its statements of disbursements online in November of last year. You can find them at disbursements.house.gov in PDF form. We at Sunlight parsed these PDFs and published the data ourselves in a structured format, for easy searchability.
It still hasn't been easy to link this dataset up to others.
Continue readingHouse Disbursements Now Online
As we mentioned earlier, the House of Representatives' Statement of Disbursements for Q3 of 2009 is now online, in PDF form. This was expected, as Speaker Pelosi had announced in June that this would happen later in the year.
This data is in the form of a single 3000-page PDF, or 3 broken-out 1000-page PDFs. They are scanned and OCRed copies of the original 3-volume book set that the Government Printing Office produces each year. For now, we're mirroring the original PDFs here, in case the House site goes down.
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