At the 2016 Legislative Data and Transparency Conference, attendees explored new ways of opening up the legislative branch to the public.
Continue readingOpening up Indiana’s hard to reach legislative data
Accessing Indiana's legislative documents is hard to do in a consistent way. So, we created a work-around that obtains bill text and makes it available to anyone via our Open States tool.
Continue readingDowngrading the district: Why we’re lowering D.C.’s legislative data score
While we commend D.C. on the fact that it's made an effort to release bulk legislative data, there are some issues that force us to downgrade the district's entry in our Open Legislative Data Report Card.
Continue readingHouse of Representatives places an order for legislative data transparency
When the House adopted new rules for the 114th Congress, it took an unprecedented step forward in the realm of legislative data transparency.
Continue readingSign the letter: Open U.S. state legislative data!
As a way to help spread the word about the significance of open legislative data, we've circulated a letter to ask U.S. state legislatures to make several important datasets available online and in open, structured form.
Continue readingEvent: Bringing Law into the Light
Join the Advisory Committee on Transparency on Monday, September 22 at the Rayburn House Office to discuss "secret laws" and ways to boost the public's ability to access and understand them.
Continue readingWhen will Open Legislative Data come to your town?
Apps for when the next bus will come are great, but what about the next law?
Continue readingComplete Local Legislative Data
When we talk about providing a transparent and legible legislative process, the first step is identifying all the moving parts that contribute to the passing of law. In Washington, D.C., this means not just following the city council, but also following D.C.’s Advisory Neighborhood Commissions, or ANCs, the hyperlocal government entities that advise the city council on community issues. Although the District’s city government structure is uniquely granular, it serves as an excellent model for understanding what a complete legislative data framework should consist of.
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.
The Legislation Will Not Be Televised
This map distinguishes five levels of legislative web and broadcasting comprehension on a sliding scale from “Best” (including all recommended elements: video formatting of floor proceedings and committee hearings, archived, and broadcasted via a variety of mediums) to “Worst” (missing several of these recommended elements). For more info (or to watch!) see the NCSL's original roundup here.
Open legislative data is integral to a functioning legible participatory democracy. The legislative data canopy covers everything from information about who represents you to the nuts and bolts of the legislative process to final letter of the law, with each element carrying its own series of challenges and considerations when it comes to public access. Timely and archived legislative process data (i.e. bills, amendments, committee meetings, votes, and contextual information, such as: research reports, legislative journals and lobbying information) are crucial to supporting citizen participation and informed voting. Video documentation of the legislative process represents the barebones of open and accountable legislative process data -- passive recordings of events as they happen for prosperity and public inclusion -- and yet this information is still not comprehensively available in most U.S. states.
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