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Congress Mulls API For Congressional Data
Amerika sends in a Wired blog post on the desire in Congress to make data on lawmaking more easily available to the public. The senator who introduced the language into an omnibus appropriations bill wants feedback on the best way to make (e.g.) the Library of Congress's Thomas data more available — an API or bulk downloads, or both. Some comments on the blog posting call for an authenticated versioning system so we can know unequivocally how any particular language made its way into a bill. "Congress has apparently listened to the public's complaints about lack of convenient access to government data. The new Omnibus Appropriations Bill includes a section, introduced by Rep. Mike Honda (D-Calif.), that would mark the first tangible move toward making federal legislative data available to the public in bulk, so third parties can mash it up and redistribute it in innovative and accessible ways. This would include all the data currently distributed through the Library of Congress's Thomas web site — bill status and summary information, lists of sponsors, tracking timelines, voting records, etc."
...then I'm all for it.
Clarity is a good thing in government.
Sent from your iPad.
Legislation is a change to the code.
The legislative process is change control.
*It is perhaps not entirely coincidental that the "code base" of law in the US is designated by the prefix "United States Code".
Seastead this.
Surely this is a call for the VW-API - the API for the People!
It'd be more useful to see laws written in something resembling plain language. There is no excuse for 1,000 page omnibus bills. If it was line-item budgets, that would be one thing.
When you can't understand the law, you can't obey the law. And since ignorance of the law is no excuse, you can basically be arrested for anything. What a world.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Not a chance. They'd never be able to use the excuse "some anonymous person slipped in this provision at the last hour and I didn't want to not vote for the bill just because of this" again...
Bills should be accessible in a form similar to patches created by diff. There should be a web service that allows you to retrieve the affected USC titles, merge them, and then apply the new bill as a patch to the federal law so that you can quickly assemble a coherent view of how the law will change.
That like /. noone in congress RTFA before signing it off. But i would love to have an option to file a Bug report and sumbit a design chage request .
somethings are best left unsaid , I am one of those things
...to actually read the shit they pass.
whatever you do DONT USE PDF !!!
I canno't stress this enough. pdf is unsearchable and a pain to make subsequent edits.
use a real text format and pay a second look at how programmers get things done.
Both. Duh.
"He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere. " -- John Calvin, commenting on Genesis 1
The process of the bill writing seems to me to be very similar with how the Wikipedia articles get started / mature. Wikipedia API was designed specifically to work with the bulk data (see http://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php ) - we can just adapt a similar approach.
(Shameless plug: I was the dev who implemented the original wiki api)
I have long thought that there should be a logic-based language for laws, at least for laws like the Tax code. My original idea in this direction was prolog, but something built on top of XML is probably more appropriate today.
It should, for example, be possible to automatically check that some 400 page law doesn't contain 1 paragraph that totally changes some other law, or that, say, 20 pages of consumer protections are not negated by two lines 100 pages later. The legal language used is already close to meta-code, but right now this all has to be checked by hand, allowing untold mischief. It should also be possible to check for logical inconsistencies and missing if-then-else options.
Some I am sure will see the current ... flexibility as a feature, not a bug, but I think it is high time to be able to do some automatic checking of what the Congress is doing and what proposed laws actually mean.
This is something that should have been looked at 15 years ago when the internet was starting to take off. An electronic copy with revision control to show how a bill has been changed and who introduced the changes is really needed and USEFUL system. Now we will be able to really see who is responsible for different things, not just the people who introduced the bill or were cosponsors, as well as who voted and how they voted on the bill. We won't just need to take their word on it that your representative has certain positions on the issues. We will be able to see exactly what their real position is on the matter.
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
line-item vetos.
Seriously. How many failed bills get shoved through as a rider on a more important bill (see the "stimulus" package for an example) because our elected officials are afraid to veto an otherwise solid bill with utter B.S. attached to it because they're afraid it would kill their career?
There's too many examples to count of crap like this happening. It would be refreshing, to say the least. And it might remove some of the internal politicking from the process. (Vote for my bill and I'll let you attach your completely unrelated failed bill to it as a rider)
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I routinely look at large bills on thomas.loc.gov to see whats in them. 485 last minute earmarks in the stimulus bill and 9000 in the 2009 budget bills. Enough to make you gag.
These are sort of like an ebay auction: 24 hours before the vote these start to stream in. Often they are placeholders "text to be supplied" or very obscure references to the organization designated for the earmark. Not even the toiling interns who are supposed to vet these for their bosses can keep up last minute submissions.
Ironically the TARP bill last year was very streamlined and only had one earmark. But that was a controversial federal judge raise.
Another nausea in the bills are that 90% are resolutions commending people or organizations in their districts. this reads like the gossip pages in the newspapers. You see this if look at the full list of recent bills.
When was the last time that Congress did a code review? The whole legislative process can boil down to a typical intern's approach to building software "write code, compile it, if it works, throw it into production until the boss (SCOTUS) says otherwise."
The legislative process needs to be made more deliberate. There need to be teams of lawyers charged with reviewing laws and drafting up use cases. Unfortunately, you won't have that until something can be done to make politicians do their jobs, and not spend all of their time pandering and promoting themselves.
Silverlight!
I almost don't want to know. "Kickback" corruption spending is practiced by basically everyone in congress. Whenever an important bill comes up, everybody says they will vote against it unless there is language included to fund some boondoggle project from their major campaign contributors back home. So they all compromise and agree to add these little corruption amendments, then vote yes. They don't care about the main topic of the bill or their constituents. They just want their kickbacks.
If we have accountability, we will have a clear picture of a system which is rotten to the core. What help would it be to find a 100% corruption rate?
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
Then I can mess with middle schoolers by editing the National Minimum Drinking Age Act to say that fifteen year olds can buy Keystone Light.
They should use git.
"...the first tangible move toward making federal legislative data available to the public in bulk, so third parties can mash it up and redistribute it in innovative and accessible ways." Meaning the MFers will start *charging* us for crap we should be getting for free. And for those who say "Naw, they wouldn't... wanna bet?
There's a lot of arguing back and forth about whether the government should use plain language.
The argument for is that then everybody can understand the law better; the argument against is that plain language tends to be ambiguous and the laws are complex in nature.
I conjecture the following: plain language can be used to describe complex systems in unambiguous ways (to the extent the systems are unambiguous, at least).
As a starting analogy, consider lambda calculus: you have three rewriting rules (variable renaming, function evaluation and eta conversion) which turn out to be turing complete: simple language, complex systems.
As another example, consider simple.wikipedia.org: it attempts to describe everything the "normal" wikipedia describes, but in a simpler language.
Regarding legislation: there has got to be some amount of complexity which is not really necessary and can be stripped away.
will they use Perl?
--
Stay tuned for some shock and awe coming right up after this messages!
the first tangible move toward making federal legislative data available to the public in bulk
And then isn't the reverse true? Won't it make it easier to collect a lot more information about who is pulling what data? I'm not saying it's happened in the past (I don't know if that suit ever went anywhere) but it is certainly possible.
Bark less. Wag more.
I guess it takes a constitutional amendment to make that happen, and if so, let's do it. Also it's interesting that the Confederate president had line-item veto power explicitly granted in that constitution.
All legislation should be written and updated in a CVS so that changes can be tracked easily, saving time & money, and also tracking who made what changes.
Consider: Congress had, a long time ago, granted its members the right to modify The Congressional Record. Supposedly these changes are limited: "Non-substantive changes can be made by members before the daily edition is published and again before the hardbound permanent edition is published"
http://www.llsdc.org/cong-record/
Given the variability of what is included and/or indexed in the various official 'records', one might reasonably conclude the politicians _DO NOT WANT_:
* Accurate
* Complete
* Accessible
records of what has transpired.
I think the proposal in question is great.
Without some sort of independent, extremely-difficult-to-corrupt watchdog agency ensuring the accuracy and completeness of what goes into the "un-changable" record, an electronic version of these journals will fail due to GIGO.
The number would be 99.8%. Dr Paul does not ever vote for those bills.
This is a fantastic idea! It would resolve a great deal of transparency problems with how our government works... yes, you can pour through Thomas, but Thomas is only a barely usable system, and its versioning capabilities definitely don't give the kind of information that would actually be useful to people trying to figure out who put line X in bill Y. If such an API existed (and was made truly useful in the ways being spoken of with versioning and robust searching), I would consider that a great victory for freedom of information.
-Vendal Thornheart
int totalCongressionalIQ = congressAPI.Stats.TotalIQ; Likely error: Cannot convert null to int because it is a non-nullable type.
Ever since I was introduced to and began using the open source source control system Subversion, I have thought about how a source control server(s) for legislative bills would be one of the best ways to allow the public to stay informed about Congressional activities and, perhaps more importantly, to easily track changes in various pieces of legislation as they work their ways through Congress. So if the administration is serious about using open source AND they want to increase transparency in the legislature then it would be hard for them to go wrong with tool(s) like Subversion.
1. Get elected to Congress.
2. Make up a bill that says you can personally go and seize any property you want from whomever you want for any reason or no reason at all.
3. Post online a bill with the same name but containing totally different text. For example, text saying how you're going to improve test scores in high schools.
4. The bill passes with overwhelming support from the public.
5. Go around the country and take whatever you want.
6. Profit!!
It's a foolproof method! No ??? before the Profit!!
You misunderstand the motivation behind legislation. Read the 'bootlegger and the baptist' when you get a chance.
Also, there is a difference between how a law emerges and how legislation emerges - the first is like evolution, people try different things and some order emerges; the second is like 'Intelligent Design'.
Don't reinvent the wheel, just use existing standards. US Code (law), Code of Fedreal Regulations, legislative bills are all already highly structured documents. And what commonly used data format is widely used for structured documents?
[drumroll]
XML. The answer here is define to several XML schemas (schemata) to capture the structure of these documents and use existing standards and technology (i.e web services over http) to distribute. None of that is rocket science or would required years of development effort, but may required years of exectuion. Its not hard; its tedious. The tedious part will be converting all the old docs over to XML.
As much as I like the idea of tracking the legislation progress, and getting legislation and L.O.C. data published to the public uniformly or standardized, WHAT THE HELL IS IT DOING ON AN OMNIBUS APPROPRIATIONS BILL????
These should be 2 separate pieces of legislation. If this gets tagged to the Appropriations bill, FROM THIS POINT FORWARD, it now has to be amended through appropriations, which is tantamount to battling for the last cookie in a kitchen full of sugar junkies.
THIS DOES NOT BELONG on an omnibus appropriations bill. PERIOD!
Didn't Congress already address part of this with xml.house.gov? Although, the schema they designed use the default namespace, yuck.
http://www.sunlightfoundation.com/about/
After reading the article and looking at
the website, I donated.
There should be some flag in the data that limits what clients are allowed to access it. Then you can implement, "This can't be forwarded to the press," or "this can't be imported into maplight.org" and other useful things. And at least the client software would then require some kind of licensing, could not be Free, and wouldn't have any sort of unapproved forks that contain unapproved features.
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
I was recently looking for an API with this kind of data and found that votesmart.org has a pretty good one that offers information on federal, state, and local government representives, legislation, votes, and more. http://votesmart.org/services_api.php
Also, the Sunlight Foundation has an API with congressional data, and they are currently holding a contest for creation of any kind of application that would help improve accountability, transparency, and interaction in government. The app has to be released under the MIT, New BSD, or GPL family of licenses. First place prize is $15,000. Submissions are due by March 31st. You can read more here: http://www.sunlightlabs.com/appsforamerica/
I am not associated with VoteSmart or the Sunlight Foundation.
They're not going to commit any more than they absolutely have to. The revisions are just going to be snapshots of the bill at the various points where they are required to submit it to the record, as is the case now. Plus, the commits are all going to come from the same low-level staffer, who conveniently has a bad memory for who asked him to add what at the last hour.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lojban
"Liberty may be endangered by the abuses of liberty as well as the abuses of power." -- James Madison
No testing. Write a 10,000 page law an dump it on us.
Programming for an open system is a conceptual oxymoron.
I think API is redundant because CRS Reports are freely down-loadable from here
I'd like to buy homeland for our 10 million people. http://twitter.com/mahadiga