Last day - turning Parliamentary records into searchable db (boingboing.net)

Say what you want about the state of American democracy, but our freedom of information laws and steps (small as they may be) in releasing digital data are far ahead of our EU counterparts. It's a common complaint I've heard from European journalists when discussing watchdog journalism, that the legal advice U.S. journalists have for getting public records has no real parallel in the EU.

In the OP's case, the data is ostensibly public, but not in a useful form. There are many parts of the U.S. gov that don't post great records, but beta.congress.gov and federalregister.gov are a couple of the best government records sites I've ever seen and contain more than enough compilable data to hack on