Tag Archives: AI

Understanding how AI accesses legislative information

At the 6th LegisTech Forum last week, we were privileged to hear an outstanding presentation by Xcential Legislative Technologies CEO and co-founder Grant Vergottini on how legislative information should be published to be most useful to modern AI tools. It is a clear, easy-to-understand explanation of many of the technological and data publication issues related to how agentic AI systems access and use authoritative legislative information to deliver knowledge about parliamentary activities to users.

After the conference, we reached out to Vergottini and he agreed to record the presentation so we could share it more widely. His firm is a key vendor for the Government Publishing Office and the House of Representatives, so it is reflective of many current challenges facing modernizing congressional legislative operations.

The presentation includes:

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House Publishes More Earmarks Request Data, Which We Enhance

At the end of last week, the House Appropriations Committee published all earmark requests for FY 2024 on the committee’s website, including publishing them as a spreadsheet. This is great and welcome news. For the first time, the appropriations spreadsheet separated member names into different columns and included state, district, party, and recipient address. This makes the information significantly more usable. Thank you.

In fact, it’s so usable, we spent a little time over the weekend making it even more robust. We enhanced their spreadsheet by adding bioguide IDs for each member, appropriations subcommittee codes, a standardized recipient address (with help from ChatGPT), and extracted the recipient state and zip code. We have been playing around with using the AI to categorize whether the recipient entity is a non-profit or a governmental entity. We can imagine a lot of use cases for this cleaned-up data.

The spreadsheet is available online here. We are continuing to tinker with it.

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