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Hacking Congress

Posted by timothy on from the nicely-though dept.

lousyd writes "Paul Ford, a writer and web developer, has kicked off a new column called 'Hacking Congress' on the O'Reilly xml.com web site. The inaugural article, "Screenscraping the Senate", discusses what he hopes to achieve and some of his initial work on turning publicly available information on U.S. Senators into XML data."

5 of 16 comments (clear)

  1. Someone point Mr. Ford to opengov by iamcadaver · · Score: 2, Informative

    opengov.us

    --
    Before I part with'em: two pennies weigh ~4.996+/-0.014g, have a zinc core, and the face of Lincoln. You can keep 'em.
    1. Re:Someone point Mr. Ford to opengov by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

      Apparently you failed to RTFA or you would have noticed that he links directly to The Open Government Information Awareness project.

  2. theyworkforyou.com by david.given · · Score: 2, Informative
    ...is a site that does much the same sort of thing for the UK government. It's a screen-scraping front end to Hansard; Hansard is the official record of pretty much everything that goes on in parliament, ever. The data's all available online but in an extremely inaccessible manner.

    They Work For You indexes, collates and cross-references it all. You can do keyword searches across all speeches and debates. It will let you do such things as look up your MP by postcode, find their speeches, see their track record (my MP rebels against her party fairly frequently, for example), and comment. You can attach comments practically anywhere. They provide a public forum where you can discuss what your government says, as they say it.

    It's cross-referenced to all kinds of other political resources on the 'net; it has RSS feeds for just about everything --- it is deeply, deeply cool, and a genuinely important resource to anyone interested in UK politics. Oh, yeah, and it's all open source, of course.

    You could do far, far worse to adopt something similar.

  3. Re:RSS feed on voting? by taubz · · Score: 2, Informative

    I am working on a website that does some of this and more, with a somewhat "open" XML backend. Bill status, voting records, statistics on representatives, text of debates on the House/Senate floors, email updates, RSS feeds....

    The site is done, but I'm working on finding an affordable colocation solution. Should be up in about 1 to 2 months, unless someone steps forward with free colocation for me.

    Stay tuned.

  4. GovStat Project at UNC and UMD by Potlucker · · Score: 2, Informative


    this project aims to bring visualization and understanding to the masses through the statistics coming from the US government.

    http://www.ils.unc.edu/govstat/