

Announcing the New York Times Congress API - brandnewlow
http://open.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/01/08/introducing-the-congress-api/

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LogicHoleFlaw
Sweet. Now cross-reference this against OpenSecrets and we're getting
somewhere.

Then, if we can just get version tracking on the edits to bills we might find
some fascinating correlations. The politicians would probably be partial to
git, the Senate being full of them.

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sachinag
The WaPo has this already: <http://projects.washingtonpost.com/congress/>
[Edit: I was wrong; it does not include contribution data. Boo.]

(Adrian Holovaty did this when he was there.)

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Harkins
I maintain this Congress app and others. Contributer data would be nice, but
it's not something we're currently planning.

Ideas welcome anytime, though. They all go on the big todo list that makes us
feel tiny.

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gills
This is cool.

I used Hpricot to parse the House floor feed a couple months back, but it slid
to the side as more important tasks came up. Maybe I should get back to that
old side project...

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asnyder
Wow, this is really really nice. I've been waiting for something like this for
a very long time. I had plans a while ago to make a website and rss feed which
would inform you of upcoming votes, and vote decisions made by your
congressperson and locally elected officials. This would allow you to be
informed on the issues you care about, as well as being able to quickly send
notice to the elected official before a vote takes place, either through
thumbs up/down, quick comments, twitter, SMS, etc.

If done well, the site would become a treasure trove of information on the
concerns in particular districts thus enabling any would be competitor to
quickly campaign on the issues that a district cares about. Thus ensuring that
the representative is working for the people, otherwise a competitor would
quickly arise with their campaign points generated for them, as well as where
they should stress those points.

Now that the times has this API maybe I'll get started...

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ubergeek42
Something similar to this has been available for a while on
<http://www.govtrack.us>

The entire website is open source, including the data files(and some of the
tools used to gather/create the data files) so if you require something more
powerful than the api provides you can create it yourself.

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Herring
It's stuff like this made me sad to hear they'll be re-mortgaging their
building.

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sh1mmer
I find it interest that a commercial organization like the NYT is doing this.

In the UK there are a number of projects like this, mostly headed up by one
group. Mysociety (<http://www.mysociety.org/>) have set up sites to see what
your MP does in Parliament, write to your MP, work with local government to
get potholes fixed, etc.

While it's good that the NYT are providing tools as well, I like the idea that
Barrack might invest money in more small Web 2.0 style NGOs like mysociety.org
in the U.S. to help get e-gov moving.

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brandnewlow
How restrictive is 5000 queries a day on a scale from 1 to 10?

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delano
If you outgrow 5000 queries per day, I'm sure you could negotiate for more.

