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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."

2 of 16 comments (clear)

  1. How long before he gets arrested? by dcocos · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Using the phrase "Hacking Congress", is probably a terrorist act. I'm pretty sure that when I drive by the Capitol, my car would get extra scrutiny if that book was in my passenger seat.

    {OT} but I've got Karma to burn And for those unfamilar with the policies in DC, every car that goes within two blocks of the Capitol Building is now searched, which is a major traffic issue seeing as Independence Ave, passes with in this zone and is (rather used to be) one the fastest ways though the city, but now with the every car must be searched issue is a pain in the ass and a traffic nightmare, let alone probably pretty close to violating the 4th Amendment.

  2. RSS feed on voting? by Piquan · · Score: 2, Interesting
    As for myself, I think it'd be good to have an RSS feed for votes. I'd like to be able to watch the bills as they're voted on, and how my senator voted (all this goes for the House too). Ideally, it should include information on the bill #, title, and abstract; how my senator voted, and the vote's outcome; and for bonus points include information in the feed about how long the bill was debated on the floor (so you can note contriversial ones), how long the text of the bill is, and the top N words used in the text of the bill, from a list of keywords ("military", "law enforcement", "copyright", etc), all just so you can take special note of bills that are more significant to you.

    I think that being able to get an overall sense of how my senator votes would be a very good thing. It'd be nice to get this information to the public. It seems that most people have no idea how their congresscritters vote. I think if we make that information trivial to see, it'll be a Good Thing.

    I've got a mental picture of a scrolling vote bar on every geeks' desktop, and every now and then our congressional representatives get a bunch of "T4I5 V073 SUXX0RZ!" emails.