The fourth Congressional Hackathon will be held on April 6th, and in advance of the proceedings we’ve updated our list of project ideas and resources for the hackathon. The information is published as a Google document, so please feel encouraged to add your own ideas or add content to existing ones.
The ideas, including a summary of the idea, recommendations, and resources, are available here. You can also find a top line summary of the idea below.
Continue ReadingLast Thursday, March 10, the Bulk Data Task Force held its first quarterly meeting of 2022. The virtual meeting, hosted by the House Clerk’s office, featured presentations from civil society representatives and updates from several legislative branch organizations including GPO, the Library of Congress, the House CAO, the House Clerk, Majority Leader Hoyer’s office, the Secretary of the Senate, and CBO. As Kirsten Gullickson from the House Clerk’s office noted, the virtual format allowed people to participate worldwide. Information from these meetings are posted online.
The video is not yet available, but we will update the blogpost when it is; you can also check here.
Mark your calendars: the second quarterly meeting is scheduled for June 9 from 2-3:30 EST.
Continue ReadingThe Fourth Congressional Hackathon will be held (in person) on Wednesday, April 6 from 1 – 6 PM in the CVC Auditorium of the Capitol Building. Majority Leader Hoyer and Minority Leader McCarthy will co-host. Register to hack here.
The last congressional hackathon was held way back in 2017. You can read our recap here. (And if you’re really feeling nostalgic, you can read our recaps of #1 and #2 too.)
The next Bulk Data Task Force meeting will be held on Zoom on Thursday, March 10, from 2 – 3:30 EST.
The second quarter meeting is scheduled for Thursday, June 9, also from 2 – 3:30 EST.
Registration for the March 10th event is now online here. The agenda is as follows:
Highlights from BDTF’s last meeting, held back in July 2021, included allowing digital submission of legislative documents to the House of Representatives during the ongoing public health emergency; the House Clerk’s Comparative Print Project and our BillMap tool for tracking legislative memes; and several other modernization updates from GPO, the Library of Congress, and the Secretary of the Senate. Read our recap here.
On September 2, 2021, the Library of Congress held the second of two virtual public fora on the Library’s role in providing access to legislative information directed by congressional appropriators in FY2020. (For reference, language requiring the proceedings was included in the committee report accompanying the FY2020 Legislative Branch Appropriations Bill.) We summarized the 2020 forum here.
The event was well attended — the Library noted over one hundred RSVPs — and several participants voiced their appreciation and recommended continuing the practice in the future. During Q&A, the Library stated that there were no plans in place for future public virtual events to continue, but indicated that we’d “hear more” about any such plans after the video was published. (No news so far.)
Continue ReadingGPO + Library of Congress announced they have completed scanning the serial set for the 69th Congress (1925-1927). A serial set contains all the numbered Senate and House Documents and Senate and House Reports for that period.
Continue ReadingLegislation is how ideas are put into a format that Congress can process and transform into law. Some ideas are introduced again and again, but in different formats or at different times. Some bills in one chamber of Congress may have a nearly identical version introduced in the other. The same bill can be introduced again and again over multiple Congresses until it is enacted into law. Or a group of legislative ideas can be rolled together into a larger legislative package.
I like to think of ideas contained in legislation as legislative memes, which is a powerful way to understand what Congress is doing. We are working on a legislative tool, call BillMap, that allows you to track legislative memes as they move through Congress.
Continue ReadingThe Bulk Data Task Force met on July 14, 2021, for the first quarterly meeting since October 2019, which is just before the COVID pandemic began. The virtual meeting included presentations from the House of Representatives, the Library of Congress, GPO, the Senate, and Demand Progress Education Fund. Video from the 2-hour long proceedings are available here and slides from the presentations are available on GPO’s Innovation Hub. More than 100 people were pre-registered to attend the meeting.
Continue ReadingToday GPO announced that statute compilations are now available online (here) in USLM XML. A statute compilation is a document that contains a law originally passed by Congress and shows how later legislation has amended the law.
Continue ReadingOn September 10, 2020, the Library of Congress held a Virtual Public Forum on the Library’s role in providing access to legislative information. The forum was held at the direction of the House Committee on Appropriations pursuant to its report accompanying the FY 2020 Legislative Branch Appropriations Bill. Per the legislative language, there will be another forum scheduled prior to October 2021. There was widespread interest in the topic: according to the Library, several hundred people registered for the event.
Prior to the forum, the Congressional Data Coalition and others sent a report containing more than two dozen recommendations concerning the Library of Congress’ legislative information services. They fell into five conceptual groupings: (1) Publish Information As Data; (2) Put the Legislative Process in Context; (3) Integrate Information from Multiple Sources; (4) Publish Archival Information; (5) Collaborate with the Public.
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