Op-Eds Legislative project ideas for coders and noncoders
I thought it would be useful to identify legislative data projects in advance of the House’s annual Legislative Data and Transparency Conference and #Hack4Congress, a congressional hackathon the Congressional Data Coalition is co-hosting with our friends, the OpenGov Foundation. I have written about some ideas previously, and others are newly published or elaborations. Not all are mine, but I like them all.
Requiring tech savvy:
- A robust roll-call vote comparison tool (more: see vote comparison tool)
- An easy-but-smart search of the Congressional Record for member statements on a topic (more: see Congressional Record search)
- A customizable daily or weekly email with all congressional hearings and floor votes, including committees and subcommittees, which at a click of a button would be added to your calendar (more: see open up draft legislation; also GovTrack’s webpage)
- Congressional Research Service
- CRS report freshness ratings (more)
- One-stop source for Congressional Research Service reports (portal to search the Web) (more)
- Build a tool that allows congressional offices to receive requests to publish CRS reports and to host the publication of those reports; bonus if it allows the member office to publish a list of all reports that a constituent/the public could request
- A means to transform draft (pre-introduction) bills from PDF to a format that supports easy comparison, markup and public discussion (more: see open up draft legislation)
- A user-friendly webpage for the federal law website LegisLink (more: see federal law online)
- Build a dashboard that reports on all House and Senate personal and committee websites that indicates whether they are Secure Sockets Layer-compliant (Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure)
- Expand Capitol Bells to the Senate (see: Ted Henderson about Capitol Bells)
- Build a congressional correspondence tracker that allows member offices to track all communications, automatically publish and thread letters and responses to the public (with redactions as appropriate)
- Transform the Congressional Record into structured data
- Transform the Constitution Annotated into structured data (pull it out of PDFs) (more: see public the Constitution Annotated as data)
- Transform the entirety of House and Senate expenditure reports into structured data (CSVs) (more: see Sunlight blogpost and 1-pager)
For noncoders and coders:
- Transform the Rules of the House of Representatives from PDF to TXT (or DOCX); ideally set up to reflect the organization of the document (e.g., indentations) (more: House Rules)
- Transform the Rules of the Senate from HTML to something with proper indentations
- Transform House and Senate Committee Rules from PDFs to TXT (or DOCX); ideally set up to reflect the organization of the document (e.g., indentations) (see: Rules of the Senate)
- Build a wiki that links to or contains all the non-PDF versions of Chamber and Committee Rules (more: House committees; Senate committees)
- Check House and Senate Committee websites to see if they work as HTTPS and compile as a list on a wiki (make a table)
