Congress should be like an open book.
The Congressional Data Task Force announced the dates of its third and fourth quarter public meetings.
The CDTF will hold its Q3 public meeting from 2-4pm ET on Thursday September 29. In the future, you can follow this link to register online.
The CDTF will hold its Q4 public meeting from 2-4 PM ET on Thursday, December 13. In the future, you can follow this link to register online.
Catch up with this recap from the June meeting.
Continue ReadingOn September 6th, the Library of Congress announced it launched a beta version of its Congress.gov API. While APIs for legislative data aren’t new for the Legislative branch — see, for example, the Government Publishing Office’s API — this is a pretty big deal. For the reason why, it’s helpful to know a little history.
Continue ReadingThe Library of Congress announced it will hold its third virtual public forum on congress.gov on September 21, 2022 from 1:30-4:30 PM ET. The forum will focus on user suggestions for enhanced access to congressional information/data on congress.gov and also provide an opportunity for the Library to provide updates on improvements to that website.
Pursuant to Congressional direction, the Library of Congress hosted virtual public fora over the last two years, which we summarized in these blogposts from 2021 and 2020. The Library had previously said it would hold this meeting, but had expressed concern about a decrease in attendance from the first to second forums. (To date, nearly 1,500 people have watched the second forum online and 6,000 have watched the first one, both of which are quite large numbers.)
To attend you must RSVP online here. The Library also has an online feedback form for those who wish to submit comments individually.
Continue ReadingClick here to download a PDF version of the paper.
Despite many reforms over time, Congress has struggled to keep up with the pace of technological change and the new burdens it has brought. In particular, because of its distributed governance, legislative branch IT operations must contend with a greater number of coordination problems, inefficiencies, and vectors for process failure. This, combined with growing district sizes and constrained resources, has left Congress’s digital capacity far behind what it needs to keep up with emerging technology trends and support everyday Americans seeking to engage with their representatives.
Continue ReadingThe Congressional Data Task Force announced significant legislative branch technology modernization efforts at their second quarter meeting on June 21, 2022, starting with a name change from the Bulk Data Task Force in recognition of the expanded scope of the working group as it goes into its second decade of existence.
We have a full report on what happened at the two-hour meeting below, but here are some highlights:
Continue ReadingThe Congressional Bulk Data Task force announced its upcoming quarterly meeting with take place on Tuesday, June 21, from 2-4 p.m. To join the meeting, register on its webpage.
On the agenda:
Don’t miss our recap from the March 2021 meeting.
The Advisory Committee on the Records of Congress has announced its semi-annual meeting on June 10th, 2022, from 10:00 a.m. to 12:00 pm ET. To attend the meeting, you must RSVP to archives@mail.house.gov by June 3rd. More details about the ACRC meeting are here.
On Wednesday, April 6th, 2022, Congress held the Fourth Congressional Hackathon, co-hosted by Majority Leader Hoyer and Minority Leader McCarthy. This blogpost is a stub to gather information from the hackathon. We will update it when we have some time.
The format of the hackathon was:
Continue Reading
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 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.)
