by Pam Greenberg
Yesterday marked the launch of OpenGovernment, a new "free for everyone, open-source, open standards, not-for-profit, and non-partisan" resource with legislative information for five states—California, Louisiana, Maryland, Texas and Wisconsin. This site brings together bill information with blog posts, news stories, social media and public participation tools, and campaign contribution data.
OpenGovernment.org is based on OpenCongress.org, and is in beta version at this point (suggestion: it’s easier on the eyes in Firefox than in IE 7). It’s a joint project of the Participatory Politics Foundation and the Sunlight Foundation. OpenGovernment hopes to raise funds to cover all 50 states in the next year.
The site's sources include:
- Official state government data from the Open States Project
- News and blog coverage via Google News and Blog Search
- Campaign contribution data from FollowTheMoney.org, via TransparencyData
- Issue group ratings and legislator contact information from Project VoteSmart
- Social media mentions from the Twitter API
- Legislator biographies from Wikipedia
- Video - to be crowdsourced for each state on Miro Community.
- U.S. Congressional data from THOMAS via data partner GovTrack and the OpenCongress API.
- Geographic maps of districts from the U.S. Census Bureau.
An example of some of the features available include tabs that show the “Most Viewed” bills and legislators or those “Most in the News.” In the Louisiana section of the site, the Senator most in the news, John Smith, was the result because the Twitter feed pulled any mention of a “John Smith” on Twitter (e.g., “The John Smith trail, America's first all-water national and historical trail”).
The creators note that they expect a few kinks, but say that much more data and features are forthcoming and welcome comments.
I am looking forward to seeing the innovative features on the sites develop, but I disagree vehemently with David Moore of the Participatory Politics Foundation, who said that "Government, official government websites for state legislatures, are clunky and not up to technical standards. No one uses them.” The official sites for these states (California, Louisiana, Maryland Texas and Wisconsin) are accessed so often that it's a little bit like Yogi Berra saying, "That place is so crowded nobody goes there any more." Take a look for yourself.
You can read more about the OpenGovernment initiative on the site’s blog.
I checked LA's page on this site & it was full of errors. I urge others to check their state's page & comment on the OpenGov site. Regrettably one has to register @ OpenCongress to comment.
Posted by: Alfred Speer | January 20, 2011 at 07:01 AM
I'm a developer on the Open State Project, one of the data sources used in OpenGovernment.org (linked incorrectly unfortunately, we're at http://openstates.sunlightlabs.com)
Saying nobody uses them was definitely an overstatement- the whole reason to make such a site seems to be that people use them but need something better. "clunky and not up to technical standards" is fair though, as someone who has spent the last year dealing with them, these sites have severe problems and usability concerns.
@Alfred- though I'm not the creator of OpenGovernment, I am interested in any data quality issues as there's hope I might be able to help get them fixed. If you'd like to contact me I'm jturk -at- sunlightfoundation.com -- I'd be happy to discuss Louisiana data with you.
Posted by: James | January 20, 2011 at 07:55 AM
Hi Pam, thanks for checking out the site, appreciate it. Thanks for your patience with this beta version as we work to optimize our queries for the hundreds of variants of names of the hundreds of legislators newly in our OG database. We'll get it tightened up with crowdsourced help. Re: my quote about state legislature .gov websites, I admit it was a bit hyperbolic, but I stand by my points that we need to open up gov't data to radical transparency & significantly higher usability. I've typed more in response here, hope it's of interest ::
http://blog.opengovernment.org/2011/01/20/opengovernment-on-ncsl-the-thicket/
... and thanks from our team again, grateful for the mention.
Posted by: David Moore | January 20, 2011 at 11:45 AM
... and a quick follow-up to second what James mentioned above, @Alfred, I'm david at ppolitics d0t org, please do be in touch with the specific issues you're seeing and we'll take a look right away. The info aggregated on OG is all cited to a primary source at one of our data partners, and if there are any discrepancies we'll move energetically to get them fixed & ensure data quality. Happy to chat phone as well at your convenience.
Posted by: David Moore | January 20, 2011 at 11:54 AM
Thanks for all your comments. I use legislative websites all the time, and have seen them become more and more citizen-friendly over the years. I also see movement toward more machine-friendly sites. I'm looking forward to seeing what happens on legislative websites and OG in the future! David, we haven’t gathered 50-state web usage /traffic statistics on legislative websites. We did this post http://ncsl.typepad.com/the_thicket/2008/01/is-anybody-watc.html on the Thicket a while ago with a few stats about webcasts. Looking forward to continued conversations.
Pam Greenberg
Posted by: PamGreenberg | January 23, 2011 at 12:40 PM
It's difficult to get this sort of opensource legislation over here in the UK -or at least to draw comparisons.. not as many exist over here.... any that you know of?
Posted by: Website video production | July 11, 2011 at 09:38 AM