Today 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 Reading August 11, 2021
Library of Congress to host virtual public forum on updates to legislative data services
The Library of Congress will host a virtual public form on federal legislative information services on September 2, 2021, starting at 1PM ET. RSVP here. This is the second — and last — forum required of the Library by House Legislative Branch Appropriators “to facilitate public input into the Library’s legislative information services and how they could be improved,” although we hope it is not the last. The Library was required to invite the public to the event and to summarize the comments and evaluate implementation of the suggestions in a report to be provided to appropriators.
Continue Reading October 18, 2020
The Recap: Library of Congress Virtual Public Forum
On 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.
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
July 13, 2017
What’s in the FY2018 House legislative branch appropriation?
By: Casey Burgat
The House Appropriations Committee approved Fiscal Year 2018 appropriations via a June 29 voice vote. The bill calls for $3.58 billion of funding for House and joint-chamber operations (Senate-specific items are not included), a full $100 million more than the enacted FY2017 funding levels. It should, however, be noted that the FY2018 appropriation is much lower than the appropriation of FY2010.
On the same day, the committee released a full report explaining the appropriating rationale.
What is actually included in the bill? Who won and who lost the funding battles?
July 6, 2017
New Madison Prizes to Honor Compromise in Congress
Rep. David Skaggs and his wife Laura established a new award for legislators who advance the public interest through compromise. More details (press release) below.
August 2, 2016
The Constitution (Annotated) In Your Pocket
After a powerful speech by Khizr Khan at the Democratic National Convention, sales of pocket U.S. Constitutions have skyrocketed, becoming the second best selling book on Amazon. This is great! But the words of the Constitution are unsufficient to provide an understanding into how it has been applied by the courts over the last two centuries. That’s where the Constitution Annotated comes it.
The Constitution Annotated (aka CONAN) is a plain language explanation of the U.S. Constitution as interpreted by the U.S. Supreme Court. Published by the non-partisan Congressional Research Service at the direction of Congress, CONAN provides insight into the meaning of our founding document. It also is available online as of 2013 and can downloaded as an app for your phone (iPhone) (Android is under development).
Unfortunately, there are flaws with CONAN — not the content, but how it’s made available to you. First, CONAN is published as PDF files, which makes it all but unreadable on your phone. The app is virtually worthless. Blast. Second, while CONAN is continuously updated by the folks at CRS, what’s available on the website and the app is not. Information can be a year or more behind recent court opinions. This is a travesty, especially when the information is readily available on the congressional intranet and the document is prepared in a format that allows for immediate updates.
We’ve been trying to fix this problem. Believe me. I’ve written about this at least once a year for eight years (2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014), usually on my birthday, Constitution Day. And I’ve lobbied on it. We did finally get CONAN published online, after an enormous effort which resulted in this letter from the Senate Rules Committee to the Government Publishing Office. But CONAN still is not being published online as it is updated, and it’s still not published in a format that would support an app or sophisticated website.
As a result, people are reading highly-biased interpretations of the Constitution instead of the legal treatise that by law must be evenhanded and impartial, and is paid for by your tax dollars.
Maybe the Senate Rules Committee, the Government Publishing Office, and the Library of Congress will move to make the Constitution Annotated available online, in real time, and in a format that human and computers can use. At a moment with so many people are interested in the Constitution, Congress should make sure that everyone has access, electronically and otherwise.
June 1, 2016
House of Reps’ Spending Info Is Now Online as Data
Yesterday the House of Representatives began publishing its spending data online as a spreadsheet (and continued publishing it online as a PDF file).
As Josh Tauberer explains in Open Government Data: The Book, the compilation of spending data, known as the Statements of Disbursements, includes “how much congressmen and their staffs are paid, what kinds of expenses they have, and who they are paying for those services.” While it does not contain all the nitty-gritty details, the Disbursements data can tell you a lot about the health and activities of Congress.
Yesterday’s publication includes the full dataset for the first quarter of 2016 in a 17.8 MB CSV file, and a smaller 502 KB summary file in CSV format. The information is also published as a PDF, which it has been since November 2009.Continue Reading
May 19, 2015
Emerging Standards of Parliamentary Accountability Panel Discussion
by Júlia Keserű
The 3rd International Open Government Data Conference in Ottawa is part of a full week of open data events. Alongside the pre-conference events, the National Democratic Institute, the Sunlight Foundation, and the Latin American Network on Legislative Transparency, as core partners in OpeningParliament.org, a community of civic organizations dedicated to opening up parliamentary data, will co-host a three-hour pre-conference event on the afternoon of Wednesday, May 27, from 2:00 to 5:00pm. The meeting will be held in the Shaw Conference Centre in Ottawa, Room 201.
The goal of the pre-conference discussion is to discuss emerging standards for parliamentary accountability, as well as the data needed to monitor compliance with them. The panelists will showcase some of the relevant work around standards and norms on openness, including the introduction of discussion documents on standards on three specific topics:
1) Parliamentary Conduct and Ethics (presented by Scott Hubli and Greg Brown, National Democratic Institute)
2) Money, Politics and Transparency (presented by Lindsay Ferris, Sunlight Foundation)
3) Lobbying (presented by Daniel Freund, Transparency International EU)
The discussion will be co-moderated by Senator Hernán Larraín, chair of the Bicameral Commission on Transparency of the Congress of Chile, and Alisha Todd, director general of ParlAmericas.
A panel discussion and introduction of these new global standards will be followed by breakout sessions on each of the three topics. If you have any questions, please email Dan Swislow (dswislow@ndi.org) or Julia Keseru (jkeseru@sunlightfoundation.com).
Please RSVP for the open parliament pre-conference event using this link.
December 9, 2014
Save the date: Bulk Data Task Force meeting
The next meeting of the Bulk Data Task Force will be Thursday, December 18, from 1-3 in the Capitol Visitor Center, room HVC-200. More information to come.
