Today's meeting of the Legislative Branch Bulk Data Task Force produced some major news. Specifically, there will be a lot of new bulk legislative data in the new year.
Continue readingTrying to track committee hearings? Why docs.house.gov may be your best bet
By Carrie Tian and Matt Rumsey. Research Assistance by Justin Lin. Every morning in Washington staffers, lobbyists, activists, and ordinary citizens are faced with choices as they try to schedule their days on Capitol Hill. To fill their calendars and get to hearings on time they have to navigate several, often conflicting, sources of information to find the right date, time, and hearing room. As a result they can find themselves checking their laptops before leaving the house and refreshing their phones as they rumble down the Redline. Docs.House.Gov, among its other features, aims to simplify this problem by becoming a one-stop repository for information on House committee hearings. We decided to look back at the first six months of this program to see how close it was coming to the ideal of including every House committee hearing, as compared to the other sources of “the same” information, notably house.gov/legislative and individual committee websites.
Continue readingAccess to Legislation Gets Better, Promise of More to Come
Earlier today, Speaker Boehner and Majority Leader Cantor and the Government Printing Office announced an improvement in how legislation is made publicly available. Starting in the 113th Congress, GPO will make all bills available for bulk download in XML format. While this doesn't change much from a technological perspective, it does mark a significant change from a policy perspective.
Continue readingSpeaker Boehner and Majority Leader Cantor on Legislative Data Release
Speaker Boehner and Majority Leader Cantor today sent a letter to the Clerk of the House calling for better access... View Article
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