The Library of Congress announced at the latest Congressional Data Task Force that the next public forum for Congress.gov will take place on September 24 from 1:00-3:00 PM. This forum is an opportunity for the public and the congressional community to provide feedback about the website.
Previous forums can be accessed on Congress.gov, and additional information will be available at the same link and on the Legislative Branch Innovation Hub.
The Congressional Data Task Force reconvened in a beautiful new location in the Jefferson Building at the Library of Congress on June 11. The meeting demonstrated how far CDTF has grown into a collaborative forum that facilitates legislative branch modernization. Most participating legislative branch support offices used their meeting slot to demo powerful platforms they’ve built for congressional users or preview coming attractions. We in civil society, working on the other side of the congressional firewall, were excited and appreciative that staff gave us a peek at their accomplishments through the demos, some of which were shared publicly for the first time.
For this issue of Make Space, we highlight Capitol Labs’ comprehensive congressional hearing database. It’s the work of Jason Lemons, former VP at Prolegis and House staffer. Lemons described the project to me as an experiment in assembling a comprehensive set of data related to hearings under one hood. It builds upon what is available from the Library of Congress via Congress.gov APIs and committee videos to make the record of the hearing much more accessible and allow for analysis in ways that only otherwise exist on expensive subscription platforms.
Continue readingThe Congressional Data Task Force convened March 20, benefiting from a nice venue upgrade inside the Capitol Visitor Center. These quarterly meetings highlight the great collaborative work taking place behind the scenes across legislative branch offices to unlock the enormous amount of information about what Congress is doing and has done in the past. It’s work that levels the playing field for members of Congress, legislative staff, and the public in terms of situational awareness and deeper institutional knowledge, which is why we think it’s so important.
Summaries of previous CDTF meetings can be found on the website using the “Congressional Data Task Force” tag.
Continue readingThe Government Publishing Office grabbed the spotlight at the Congressional Data Task Force meeting on December 13 by announcing that it is launching a Model Context Protocol server for artificial intelligence tools to access official GPO publication information. The MCP server lets AI tools like ChatGPT and Gemini pull in official GPO documents when answering questions.
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A key way to understanding the influence and position of different factions within the Democratic Caucus and Republican Conference in the House of Representatives is to study the major ideologically-based caucuses that almost all members join. Tracking caucuses’ members within the institution is hampered, however, by the lack of membership information in data provided by the House. Although most caucuses publish their rosters on their websites, the absence of that information in available structured member biographical data makes using it in congressional research laborious.
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