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Tag Archive: API

112th Congress live in Congress API

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Now that they've been sworn in, all members of the 112th Congress are now available in our Congress API.

All members are now added along with their ids on other sites (Project Vote Smart/FEC/bioguide/etc.) but we're still working on getting some of the contact information as house.gov and senate.gov have just updated. We'll be working on these today and tomorrow and expect that all contact information will be available today and social media accounts will be up to date within a week.

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Sunlight Congress API & The 112th Congress

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We've recently gotten a few questions about our Congress API and when it will include new members elected in November.

The reason that these members are not yet in the Congress API is that most* new members will not take office until January 3, 2011 when the 112th Congress convenes. Because the 111th Congress is still in session we are waiting until these members are sworn in and have offices assigned to them to add them to the API. Rest assured though that we have begun work on tracking down all of the relevant information for the representatives and senators elect and should have a large update for the first week of the new year.

Note: Some individuals, such as Mark Kirk in Illinois were elected in special elections and have already been added to the API. To keep track of what changes have been made already look at our apidata repo.

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Preview: Real Time Congress API

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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.

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Introducing the Open State Project API

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Over a year ago we announced our intention to build scrapers that would collect and sanitize legislative information from all fifty states, an initiative that is now known as the Open State Project.

As of today we're proud to announce a new milestone for the project, version 1 of the Open State Project API. You can start using our API today to get access to information on more than 37,000 bills and 1,600 legislators from the most recent sessions of 10 state legislatures.

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How We Use MongoDB at Sunlight

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MongoDB

Last week, David and I attended MongoNYC, a one-day conference focused on MongoDB. We like Mongo here at Sunlight. We like it a lot.

Working with Mongo, it's become clear that it's a more natural way to store data. We primarily use Python and Ruby, and because Mongo allows us to think in JSON, everything tends to just click. JSON documents are close enough to objects in Python and Ruby that mapping between application and database becomes almost effortless. Mongo has really shined in two specific use cases: as a datastore for a resource oriented web service, and as a datastore for results from scraping a web site.

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The Drumbone API

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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.

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Real Time Disclosure, Technically Speaking

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Image of our Open Government home page

Last week's Citizens United v. FEC Supreme Court decision was a game-changer in terms of corporate money in politics. In short, corporations will be allowed to freely spend unlimited amounts of money to support or oppose a candidate, just as long as there is no direct coordination with that candidate's campaign. Unprecedented amounts of corporate money will now flow into our political process. But here at Sunlight, we're focusing on the disclosure aspects of the decision. The majority opinion stated:

With the advent of the Internet, prompt disclosure of expenditures can provide shareholders and citizens with the information needed to hold corporations and elected officials accountable for their positions and supporters.

While the decision doesn't mandate "prompt disclosure", it does strongly recommend it. So what does disclosure at Internet speed look like?

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Sunlight Labs API One Year Later

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It has been about a year since we launched the new version of the Sunlight Labs API and seeing as just recently it recieved it's 500th user and 3,000,000th api call, we thought it might be good to take a look at the changes over the last year. This chart should give some idea of what the growth has been like to get to this point:

chart of api calls by date

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