Congressional Job Listings as Data

The House of Representatives publishes job postings for personal, committee, and leadership offices in the form of a weekly email sent to subscribers. This means that if you’re a job seeker, you must read each PDF each week to see whether there’s a job that might interest you. And if you’re interested in monitoring job posting generally, or sharing those postings with others, you’re out of luck — the information is not published in a data format that allows for re-sharing and analysis. (More on that in a minute).

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Identifying Legislative Data Resources and Project Ideas

As a community, we can do a better job to help people find federal legislative data sources and identify useful technology projects. This has become increasingly apparent in the wake of last week’s Legislative Data and Transparency Conference and the hackathon #Hack4Congress. Accordingly, I am pleased to announce two new community projects.

First, I’ve started an index of structured legislative data. It is published in a hackpad, so anyone can edit the document to add new ideas or clean up the first draft.

Second, I’ve started a comprehensive list of useful projects that rely on legislative data. It too is published on a hackpad. Ultimately, each project should be fleshed out with a description, links to where necessary data can be found, and the status of the project. If there are additional tools that should be built, please add them there.

Finally, we should create a more comprehensive listing of tools that allow people to follow Congress and make use of its information. For now, see this blogpost as a useful starting point.