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Comment by smitty1e | Hacker News Reader

I want more.

Give me a public, read-only Git repo with elected officials able to commit to the various branches.

Then we can mine the metadata for a better picture of what the Congrescritters are getting up to.

The bills proposed by legislators are published in open data (thanks to years of advocacy by myself and others, but that's another story). If you want to read it and know who proposed it, this information has been readily available on the Internet since 1995. If you want to do some data mining, the data has been readily available to download in XML for about 5-10 years from Congress itself and for the decade before that from govtrack.us. If you're not doing the data mining already, that is about you and not about the availability of the data.

Is there a publicly accessible view where people can see bills, how they've changed and who proposed the changes then?

https://www.govtrack.us/

> Today we’re the leading non-governmental source of legislative information and statistics.

If they screwed up and left me in charge, Congress itself would live in a public git repo.

All non-classified content.

Let the data science folks see if any sense can be made of it.

They are just a wrapper over congress.gov apis

https://www.congress.gov/help/using-data-offsite

If someone put you in charge, you probably would not know how to do the thing you're imagining. (For example, "classified" doesn't really apply to Congress. That's an executive branch thing. So you're already on the wrong track.) Don't fool yourself that it's just a matter of having a bright idea that's the difference between the world as it is and the world as you want it.

I can't refute "you" in the singular.

Nor should a solo ninja effort be acceptable.

The post was operating at the "decree", no implementation level.

https://www.congress.gov/

As an example of the information on each bill, here's the entry for last year's American Rescue Plan Act: https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-bill/1319

I want more too - I want state level stuff promoted more - I want rss for each city/county council member and state level office - not just what they voted on, but what is coming up - also who has given them money, and who has had meetings with them.

Call up your rep and ask them to add it to the budget.

Build it and I will subscribe

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