Announcing the New York Times Congress API

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.

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...

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...

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.

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

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.

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