This past week we upgraded our EveryCRSReport website, which as of this writing contains approximately 17,700 reports. By comparison, the official CRS website has only around 8,500 reports. The result is that we will continue to provide you the most up-to-date CRS reports as well as an extensive archive.
Continue Reading September 8, 2020
Library of Congress to host virtual meeting on its legislative information services
On Thursday, September 10th, the Library of Congress will host its first-ever virtual forum on the Library’s legislative information services at 10 a.m. ET. (Follow the link to RSVP).
Continue Reading September 4, 2020
Recommendations to the Library of Congress: Legislative Information Services and How They Could Be Improved
In anticipation of next week’s Virtual Public Forum hosted by the Library of Congress, we submitted the following recommendations to the Library of Congress on how it could improve its Legislative Information Services. The report is available online here. The recommendations cover the following five categories:
- Publish Information as Data
- Put the Legislative Process in Context
- Integrate Information from Multiple Sources
- Publish Archival Information
- Collaborate with the Public
October 23, 2019
Bulk Data Task Force Reports Major Strides at October 2019 Meeting
The Bulk Data Task Force (BDTF) is essentially the justice league of legislative data.
The task force convenes each quarter, bringing together the people in charge of managing Legislative Branch data—like the House Clerk, Secretary of the Senate, GPO, and Library of Congress—as well as outside stakeholders. Together the group works to make legislative data freely accessible to all.
The task force convened last week at the Legislative Data and Transparency Conference.
Here are the highlights:
Continue Reading September 30, 2019
7th Annual House Legislative Data and Transparency Conference Announced
The seventh annual Legislative Data and Transparency Conference has been announced!
On Thursday October 17th, agencies, data users, and transparency advocates will come together to discuss Congress’s efforts to make legislative information available to the public as data.
The conference covers what’s working well, what’s not, and provides an opportunity to hear from and meet with the people working to make things better.
You can RSVP for the Thursday, October 17, 2019 event here.
You can find recaps of prior conferences and links to video from the conferences here:
- Recap of the 2018 conference
- Announcement of the 2018 conference
- Announcement of the 2017 conference
- Report from the 2016 Legislative Data and Transparency Conference
- Report from the 2015 Legislative Data and Transparency Conference
- House Concludes Third Annual Legislative Data and Transparency Conference (2014)
- House’s Legislative Data and Transparency Conference a Success (2013)
- Brief Recap of the First Legislative Data and Transparency Conference(2012)
July 13, 2019
Recap of the July 2019 Bulk Data Task Force Meeting
Last week the Bulk Data Task Force (BDTF) convened internal and external stakeholders to discuss, you guessed it, congressional data.
Established in 2012, the BDTF brings together parties from across the legislative branch—including the House Clerk, the Secretary of the Senate, Government Publishing Office (GPO), Library of Congress (LOC), and more—as well as external expert groups to make congressional information easier to access and use.
Scroll down for a list of tools, both currently available and in the works, as well as announcements from the meeting.
New Tools
In development phase
“Track changes” for legislation: The Clerk is working on a platform that will allow for comparing versions of legislation; staff will be able to see how an amendment changes a bill and a bill changes a law. A version of the tool is already available to the House Office of Legal Counsel and a minimum viable product will be available to legislative counsels in August or September. The full version of the tool could be available at the end of next year, but TBD if it is for internal use only.
In research phase
Automated bill sponsorship tool. There are about 135,000 co-sponsorships on bills every Congress; the Clerk’s office currently spends five hours of each day in session collecting handwritten sponsor sheets and inputting names. The Clerk is examining the viability of creating an automated tool that provides a list of bills available for co-sponsorship online and, through secure means, allow Members to request their names be added to a bill.
Unique identifiers for lobbyists. Currently, lobbyists are assigned unique identifiers (IDs) but those are not disclosed to the public; this makes tracking lobbyist activity very difficult. For example, if someone fills out their lobbying forms and there’s a typo, or they write their full name one year and a nickname the following year, there’s no way to tell that all these forms are covering one individual’s activity.
In discussion phase
A live feed of House floor votes. No plans have been made yet.
Available now:
An API for bill status in the Bulk Data Repository. You can find the GovInfo API here; to access it you will need a key from APIkey.data.gov.
Standardized committee witness forms in PDF format. Documents’ naming convention is “TTF” so if you’d like to look up witness truth in testimony forms you can go to Docs.House.Gov and search for “TTF.”
Sites
The public can give feedback and submit requests for documents, data, and fixes at github.com/usgpo/bill-status.
Durable links to government information, can be found at GPO’s link service.
RSS feeds for content and metadata can be found at govinfo.gov/feeds.
When in doubt, check out the Legislative Branch Innovation Hub, home base for legislative data
The United States Web Design System is an open source site that brings together government engineers, content specialists and designers to make building government sites easier.
The Tech Timeline covers congressional tech history from the first House telephone in 1880 to the first House website in 1994, plus everything before and after.
New Sites
The Clerk’s Consensus Calendar tracks bills with 290 or more sponsors. According to a new House rule for this Congress, each week the Speaker must pick one of the bills with 290 or more sponsors for 25 legislative days for consideration on the floor.
HouseLive.gov is being moved to a beta version of Live.House.gov.
The in-house video clipping tool has been replaced by FloorClips.House.Gov.
In August, ClerkPreview.House.gov will move out of beta and become Clerk.House.gov. Scrapers using the site may be disrupted or broken.
Announcements
The 2019 Data Transparency Conference will be happening this fall, specific date TBD. Suggestions for topics and dates can be submitted on the github innovation site.
FDSys is officially fully retired. The old federal digital system was replaced by GovInfo.gov which has been online in beta since 2016 and out of beta since January 2018.
Thomas was retired in 2016 and its replacement Congress.gov has had several upgrades. For example, you can now sort search results by subcommittee and historic committee names will auto-populate. Looking ahead, the Library hopes to offer email notifications for committee hearings and meeting information.
You can trust the Government Publishing Office: GPO was certified as an ISO 16363 trustworthy digital repository. It is the first U.S. organization to earn the certification, and the second in the world.
June 30, 2019
Save the Date: BDTF Meeting on July 9
The Next Bulk Data Task Force will be on Tuesday, July 9, from 11:00 – 12:00, in Cannon B03 Cannon. If you cannot make it in person, it is possible to join remotely via a Zoom conference. (Contact the Clerk to make arrangements).
On the agenda:
1. Introductions/ BDTF Background
2. Project Updates
• GPO
• LOC – Congress.gov
• Clerk – Comparative print / New Clerk website / HouseLive
3. 2019 Data Transparency Conference
4. Questions/ Discussion
The last meeting was in late October, 2018, and there was a lot of news.
More information on the BDTF can be found on the Legislative Information Resource Hub, and don’t miss the recent Congressional Transparency Caucus event that featured 10 technology tools for legislating and oversight.
June 8, 2019
Transparency Caucus: innovative tools and technologies for Congress
On June 7, the Transparency Caucus of the U.S. House of Representatives hosted a remarkable forum inside of the United States Capitol that featured ten presentations from government officials and members of civil society on innovative tools and technologies. Following is a run down of who spoke and the services, tools and projects they shared:
- Oversight.gov, with Michael Horowitz, Inspector General, Department of Justice
- EveryCRSReport.com, with Daniel Schuman, Demand Progress Education Fund
- Congress.gov, with Andrew Weber, Library of Congress
- PopVox.com, with Marci Harris, POPVOX
- ClerkPreview.House.gov, with Veneice Smith, Clerk, House of Representatives
- CourtListener.com, with Steve Schultze
- GovTrack.us, with Ben Hammer, GovTrack
- Represent, with Derek Willis, ProPublica
- OpenSecrets.org, with Sheila Krumholz, Center for Responsive Politics
- Dome Watch, with Steve Dwyer, Majority Leader Hoyer
Video from the event is available below.
November 5, 2018
What You Need to Know About the November 2018 Bulk Data Task Force Meeting
This past Thursday’s Bulk Data Task Force meeting had a ton of info about technology in Congress. Here are some highlights:
Info about newly elected members of the House will be online in a structured data format from the House Clerk’s office by Nov. 13, and updated weekly thereafter, an amazing turnaround for data that historically has been hard to come by until January.
The Library is behind on publishing CRS reports. All “R series” reports should be up by the end of April, with the remaining reports expected by Sept. 30th. The statutory deadline was this past Sept. 18th. As of Sunday, CRSReports.Congress.gov had 1,251 reports. In the meantime, you can read all the current reports at EveryCRSReport.com.
A consolidated calendar for House and Senate meetings won’t be launched by the Library for the December 21st deadline, but a first phase will be completed in the first quarter (i.e. by Friday, March 29); it is expected to include information about all congressional proceedings. Integration of links to videos of proceedings may take longer. In the meantime, use GovTrack’s congressional committee calendar.
The refresh of Bioguide.Congress.gov — the website containing the names, photos, and biographies of every member of Congress — is on track. By the end of the March 2019, the information will be published as structured data and put on a secure (HTTPS) website. The long term goal is to create a publicly available API.
The House’s Truth in Testimony forms will become webforms. For now, they’ll generate PDFs that the committees will post individually to their webpages, but the long term goal is for the data to go into a central repository for publication, making it possible to track people as they testify before multiple committees.
GPO released an initial set of 40 Statute Compilations as a pilot on govinfo last week. More is coming. The compilation includes public laws that either do not appear in the U.S. Code or that have been classified to a title of the U.S. Code that has not been enacted into positive law.
Want to see how a draft bill would change the law in real time? The House is still working on it. The target date for making that tool available to Congressional staff is the end of 2019. And to the public? No date is set.
A few quick resources :
— GPO’s Developer Hub is a great resource for data stored on govinfo.gov.
— The Leg Branch Innovation Hub highlights tech-friendly leg branch activities. It includes info on bulk data task force meetings.
— Interested as Congress.gov rolls out new features? They’ve got a listserv for that.
We should note that five of the projects described above were required either in the FY 2017 or FY 2018 legislative branch appropriations bills. When the video from the proceedings are available, we will include it below.
July 15, 2018
Recap of the 2018 Legislative Data and Transparency Conference
Congress held its sixth annual Legislative Data and Transparency Conference this past week.
Lest we forget, these conference are extraordinary. Hosted by the House of Representatives Committee on House Administration, it pulls together the vast majority of the internal and external Congressional stakeholders to talk in detail about the House and Senate’s operations. It provides a forum for candid questions and conversations with the people who are the decision-makers and the implementers, and changes are often made in response to the conversations.
Unlike prior years, I’m reluctant to do this write up because so much has happened and I’m sure I will leave out important items. I’m publishing my real-time notes here, and I hope that you’ll forgive the impressionistic nature of this write-up.
Legislative Branch Innovation Hub
GPO has launched a legislative branch innovation hub website, built on GitHub, that “seeks to highlight Legislative branch activities that use technology to cultivate collaboration, foster data standardization, and increase transparency.” Wow, right?
GPO is encouraging the public to file pull requests and otherwise to use this as a platform to communicate with Congress about technology and transparency. But even more than that, the website crosses silos and will be used by multiple stakeholders inside Congress. For example, It seems to encompass the Clerk’s vision of a resource for where to find legislative branch data.
Comparative Prints Projects
The House Clerk is continuing its efforts to provide real-time comparison between documents. Its long term version is to deploy platforms to all House staff and others to create, on demand, visuals of changes in important documents. This includes changes between bill proposals and current law; and also how an amendment would change a bill. Here’s an example of a comparative print.
Updated Clerk’s website
The Clerk of the House is continuing to modernize its website, which can be viewed in alpha at Clerkpreview.house.gov. By end of 2018, the Clerk intends to update the help and resources, member election stats, disclosures, and notes there’s a new version of HouseLive.
API for GovInfo
GPO has launched an API for most of the information contained on GovInfo, its gigantic website of government reports and documents. This is a big deal, as the API will provide an incredible useful complement to bulk access. At the moment not included are the documents published in bulk, like legislation, but they are taking requests for additional items to make available through the API.
Senate website
The Senate’s website is now mobile friendly and they’ve completely redesigned the information architecture behind that site.
Ask Alexa
The Clerk’s office came up with a clever project to integrate their data holdings with Alexa, the web app for Amazon’s echo. You can ask whether the House is in session, who your representative is, and what meetings are happening today. Submit ideas for other questions Alexa should answer here.
USLM
A lot of what makes it possible to put legislative information to use is having it generated in a structured data format. The Congress has been working hard to make its information available in the United States Legislative Model (USLM).
The Congress has developed a new USLM schema (version 2.0) and are asking for feedback. They’re also currently working on moving public bills and statutes into USLM, which will empower many of the new tools they wish to develop (such as important updates to legislative drafting).
Congress.gov
The Library of Congress is continuing to make welcome incremental improvements in Congress.gov, such as efforts to track committee names as they’ve changed over time and improve saved alerts. (See their enhancements timeline.)
The Library didn’t answer address questions about integration of CRS reports onto the Library’s website, although they showed a few images and suggested a September 18, 2018 implementation date. (Their implementation plan suggests non-compliance with both the requirements of the law and best practices for creating web resources.) They didn’t get into the joint House/Senate committee calendar, which will shortly be required by law. They did give a presentation on their app challenge, won by a high school student for a neat visualization of treaty info, and some of the experiments being conducted by LC Labs.
Other Presentations
The conference featured a number of great presentations, by Ed Walters’ presentation on “9 ways the government can work with private publishers on public access” stood out. It’s worth watching it on video.
Additional Resources
For more, the conference agenda is here; video of the conference is here; and my recap of prior conferences are here.
