{"id":2173,"date":"2011-12-05T10:10:58","date_gmt":"2011-12-05T15:10:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.law.cornell.edu\/voxpop\/?p=2173"},"modified":"2011-12-05T10:10:58","modified_gmt":"2011-12-05T15:10:58","slug":"opengovernment-org-researching-u-s-state-legislation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.law.cornell.edu\/voxpop\/2011\/12\/05\/opengovernment-org-researching-u-s-state-legislation\/","title":{"rendered":"OpenGovernment.org – Researching U.S. State Legislation"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Civic Need<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Civic morale in the U.S. is punishingly low and bleeding out. When it comes to recent public approval of the U.S. Congress, we’re talking imminent negative territory, if such were possible. Gallows chuckles were shared over an October 2011 NYT\/CBS poll<\/a> that found approval of the U.S. Congress down to 9% — lower than, yes, communism<\/a>, the British Petroleum company during the oil spill, and King George III at the time of the American Revolution. The trends are beyond grim: Gallup<\/a> in November tracked Congress falling to 13% approval, tying an all-time low. For posterity, this is indeed the first branch of the federal government in America’s constitutional republic, the one with “the power of the purse<\/a>“, our mostly-millionaire law-makers. Also: the branch whose leadership recently attempted to hole up in an anti-democratic, unaccountable “SuperCommittee<\/a>” to make historic decisions affecting public policy in secret. Members of Congress are the most fallible, despised elected officials in our representative democracy.<\/p>\n

OpenCongress<\/em>: Responding with open technology<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Such was the visceral distrust of government (and apathy about the wider political process, in all its messy necessity) that our non-profit organization, the Participatory Politics Foundation (PPF)<\/a>, sought to combat with our flagship Web application, OpenCongress.org<\/a><\/em>. Launched in 2007, its original motto was: “Bringing you the real story about what’s happening in Congress.” Our premise<\/a>, then as today, is that radical transparency in government will increase public accountability, reduce systemic corruption in government, and result in better legislative outcomes. We believe free and open-source technology can push forward and serve a growing role in a much more deliberative democratic<\/a> process — with an eye towards comprehensive electoral reform and increased voter participation. The technology buffet includes, in part, the following: software (in the code<\/a> that powers OpenCongress); Web applications (like the user-friendly OpenCongress<\/em> pages and engagement tools<\/a>); mobile (booming, of course, globally); libre data and open standards; copyleft licensing; and more. One articulation of our goal is to encourage government, as the primary source, to comply exhaustively with the community-generated Principles of Open Government Data<\/a> (which, it should be noted, are continually being revised and amended by #opengov<\/a> advocates, as one would expect in a healthy, dynamic, and responsive community of watchdogs with itchy social sharing fingers). Another articulation of our goal, put reductively: we’ll know we’re doing better when voter participation rates<\/a> rise in the U.S. from our current ballpark of 48% to levels comparable to those of other advanced democracies. Indeed, there has been a very strong and positive public demand for user-friendly Web interfaces and open data access to official government information. Since its launch, OpenCongress<\/em> has grown to become the most-visited not-for-profit government transparency site in the U.S. (and possibly the world), with over one million visits per month, hundreds of thousands of users, and millions of automated data requests filled every week.<\/p>\n

OpenGovernment.org<\/em>: Opening up state legislatures<\/strong><\/p>\n

The U.S. Congress, unfortunately, remains insistently closed-off from the taxpaying public — living, breathing people and interested constituent communities — in its data inputs and outputs, while public approval keeps falling (for a variety of reasons, more than can be gestured towards here). This discouraging sentiment might be familiar to you — even clich\u00e9 — if you’re an avid consumer of political news media, political blogs, and social media. But what’s happening in your state legislature? What bills in your state House or Senate chambers are affecting issues you care about? What are special interests saying about them, and how are campaign contributions influencing them? Even political junkies might not have conversational knowledge of key votes in state legislatures, which — if I may be reductive — take all the legislative arcane-ness of the federal Congress and boil it down to an even more restrictive group of state capitol “insiders” who really know the landscape. A June 2011 study<\/a> by the University of Buffalo PoliSci Department found that, as summarized on Ballotpedia<\/a> :<\/p>\n

First, the American mass public seems to know little about their state governments. In a survey of Ohio, Patterson, Ripley, and Quinlan (1992) found that 72 percent of respondents could not name their state legislator. More recently, an NCSL<\/a>-sponsored survey found that only 33 percent of respondents over 26 years old could correctly identify even the party that controlled their state legislature.<\/em><\/p>\n

Further, state legislative elections are rarely competitive, and frequently feature only one major party candidate on the ballot. In the 2010 elections, 32.7 percent of districts had only one major party candidate running. (Ballotpedia 2010) In 18 of the 46 states holding legislative elections in 2010, over 40 percent of seats faced no major-party challenge, and in only ten states was the proportion of uncontested seats lower than 20 percent. In such an environment, the ability to shirk with limited consequences seems clear.”[1]<\/a><\/sup><\/em><\/p>\n

To open up state government, PPF created OpenGovernment.org<\/a><\/em> as a joint project with the non-profit\"\"<\/a> Sunlight Foundation<\/a> and the community-driven Open States Project<\/a> (of Sunlight Labs<\/a>). Based on the proven OpenCongress<\/em> model of transparency, OpenGovernment<\/em> combines official government information with news and blog coverage, social media mentions, campaign contribution data, public discussion forums, and a suite of free engagement tools. The result, in short, is the most user-friendly page anywhere on the Web for accessing bill information at the state level. The site, launched<\/a> in a public beta on January 18th, 2011, currently contains information for six U.S. state legislatures: California, Louisiana, Maryland, Minnesota, Texas, and Wisconsin. In March 2011, OpenGovernment<\/em> was named a semi-finalist<\/a> in the Accelerator Contest at South by Southwest Interactive conference. <\/p>\n

Skimming a state homepage — for example, California<\/a> — gives a good overview of the site’s offerings: every bill, legislator, vote, and committee, with as much full bill text as is technically available; plus issues, campaign contributions, key vote analysis, special interest group positions, and a raft of social wisdom. A bill page — for example, Wisconsin’s major freedom of association bill, SB 11<\/a> — shows how it all comes together in a highly user-friendly interface and, we hope, the best-online user experience. Users can track, share, and comment on legislation, and then contact their elected officials over email directly from OpenGovernment<\/em> pages. OpenGovernment<\/em> remains in active open-source development. Our developer<\/a> hub has more information. See also our wish-list<\/a> and how anyone can help us grow<\/a>, as we seek to roll out to all 50 U.S. state legislatures before the November 2012 elections.<\/p>\n

Opening up state legislative data: The benefits<\/strong><\/p>\n

To make the value proposition for researchers explicit, I believe fundamentally there is clear benefit in having a go-to Web resource to access official, cited information about any and all legislative objects in a given state legislature (as there is with OpenCongress<\/em> and the U.S. Congress). It’s desirable for researchers to know they have a permalink of easy-to-skim info for bills, votes, and more on OpenGovernment<\/em> — as opposed to clunky, outmoded official state legislative websites (screenshots of which can be found in our launch blog post<\/a>, if you’re brave enough to bear them). Full bill text is, of course vital for citing, as is someday having fully-transparent version-control by legislative assistants and lobbyists and members themselves. For now, the site’s simple abilities to search legislation, sort by “most-viewed,” sort by date, sort by “most-in-the-news,” etc., all offer a highly contemporary user-experience, like those found by citizens elsewhere on the Web (e.g., as online consumers or on social media services). Our open API<\/a> and code<\/a> and data repositories ensure that researchers and outside developers (e.g., data specialists) have bulk access to the data we aggregate, in order to remix and sift through for discoveries and insights. Bloggers and journalists can use OpenGovernment<\/em> (OG) in their political coverage, just as OpenCongress<\/em> (OC) continues to be frequently cited<\/a> by major media sites and blog communities. Issue advocates and citizen watchdogs can use OG to find, track, and contact their state legislators, soon with free online organizing features like Contact-Congress<\/a> on OC. OpenGovernment<\/em>‘s launch was covered by Alex Howard of O’Reilly Radar<\/a>, the National Council of State Legislatures (The Thicket<\/a> blog), and Governing<\/a>, with notes as well from many of PPF and Sunlight’s #opengov<\/a> #nonprofit<\/a> allies, and later on by Knight Foundation<\/a>, Unmatched Style<\/a>, and dozens of smaller state-based political blogs.\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The technology that powers OpenGovernment.org<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

The technology behind OpenGovernment<\/em> was assembled by PPF’s former Director of Technology (and still good friend-of-PPF, following his amicable transition to personal projects) Carl Tashian. <\/a> In designing it, Carl and I were driven first by a desire to ensure the code was not only relatively-remixable but also as modular as possible. Remixable, because we hoped and expect that other open-source versions of OpenGovernment<\/em> will spring up, creating\u00a0(apologies for the clich\u00e9, but it’s one I am loathe to relinquish, as it’s really the richest, most apt description of a desirable state of affairs) a diverse ecosystem of government watchdog sites for state legislatures. Open data and user-focused Web design can bring meaningful public accountability not only to state legislatures, but also to the executive and judicial branches of state government as \"\"<\/a>well. PPF seeks non-profit funding support to bring OpenGovernment<\/em> down to the municipal level — county, city, and local town councils, as hyper-local and close to the neighborhood block as possible — and up to foreign countries and international institutions like the United Nations<\/a>. In theory, any government entity with official documents and elected official roles is a candidate for a custom version of OpenGovernment<\/em> facing the public on the open Web — even those without fully-open data sets, which of course, most countries don’t have. But by making OpenGovernment<\/em> as modular as possible, we aimed to ensure that the site could work with a variety of data inputs and formats. The software is designed to handle a best-case data stream — an API of legislative info — or less-than-best, such as XML feeds, HTML scraping, or even a static set of uploaded documents and spreadsheets.<\/p>\n

Speaking of software, OpenGovernment<\/em> is powered by GovKit<\/a>, an open-source Ruby gem for aggregating and displaying open government APIs from around the Web. Diagrammed here<\/a>, they are summarized here with a few notes:\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n