It’s that time again. Elections are over and a key question has been rolling in from those of you that use our legislative APIs: When can I expect to see the newly elected officials in the data?
Continue readingOpen States: Find and Follow Your State Capitol
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.
Continue readingFifty State Project: Redux
The Fifty State Project is now over a year old and has evolved from a Sunlight Labs side project to a funded endeavor. With this renewed focus on the project we're taking a look at some of the problems we've faced to see how we (and the community) can better tackle them.
Continue readingTake 5 Minutes to Help the Fifty State Project
Early this year we began our Fifty State Project, a project to scrape and organize data from all fifty state legislative websites. We have also started to run into cases where despite the best efforts of the developers on the project we can't get the full range of information we need to make this legislative data useful.
We have just posted a new TransparencyCorps task to help digitize this information, starting with the results from the Kentucky Legislature.
Continue readingAnnouncing Our Summer of Code 2009 Participants
Yesterday Google announced this years participants in Google Summer of Code <http://socghop.appspot.com/>_, Google's program that pays students a stipend to work on an open source project during their summer.
This is Sunlight Labs' first year participating and we were extremely grateful to be granted three slots for this summer. Interest definitely exceeded our expectations leaving us with the difficult job of going through a lot of excellent proposals to select our top three applicants. We wish we could have accepted more proposals and hope that some of the students that found out about us through this program will pursue their ideas even though we were not able to accept them at this time.
Continue readingFifty states Project: April 10th Status Report
Six weeks ago we announced on this blog <http://www.sunlightlabs.com/blog/2009/02/26/fifty-state-project/>_ the Fifty State Project <http://wiki.sunlightlabs.com/index.php/Fifty_State_Project>_, our ambitious project to begin building scrapers and storing data for all legislative information from all fifty states. At the time this project seemed like a longshot, but almost immediately a community rose to the challenge and there are now more than a dozen contributors and more than thirty states in progress.
Thank you, PyCon
Today was an amazing day for Sunlight Labs. Check this out:
That's our code sprint in PyCon today. Developers have, according to the wiki, checked out over 20 states to work on, and it looks like amazing, serious progress is being made there.
So to the Pycon and greater Python community-- thank you for all that you do. You are amazing.
See more of Josh's photos here
Continue readingOur next big goal, The Fifty State Project
While no single developer has the time to volunteer writing a custom scraper for each state, the goal of having data for all fifty states is entirely attainable if we come together and share the workload. This is where you come in. We need your help databasing state legislation.
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