As Open States closes in on our initial goal of supporting all 50 state legislatures (just 3 more to go!) we’re also planning to put out a report card evaluating the availability of state legislative data across every state.

As the 40+ individuals that have sat down and helped us scrape state sites can affirm, most states simply don’t do a decent job of making legislative information available so we’re hoping that this can serve as a sort of wake up call to states that make this vital data far too difficult to access. For those few states that are doing a good job we’re hoping to praise their commitment to open data and point out areas where they can do better.

We’ve come up with a set of criteria based on Sunight’s “Ten Principles for Opening Government Data” (which expand upon the 8 Principles of Open Government Data) that we feel we can fairly apply to the states and created a survey to evaluate states against this criteria.

In order to guarantee a high quality report we’d like to get several responses per state and that’s where you can help us out. Click the link below to head to a form that will ask you to evaluate the information that your state legislature makes available via their official website. By doing this you’ll help us ensure that our eventual report is as accurate and as complete as possible.

Fill Out a State Survey

(If you have any questions feel free to contact jturk@sunlightfoundation.com. If there are any questions you aren’t sure how to answer we’d prefer you leave them unanswered instead of guessing.)