US Senate Votes Now Available in XML - Bring on The Mashups!
Today is an important day in the history of politics and technology - the US Senate voting record is finally available in machine-readable XML (extensible markup language) format. Mashups, vote tracking and comparison applications, will now be welcomed in the front door of Congress as first class technologies.
On May 1st South Carolina's Senator, Jim DeMint, officially asked the Senate Rules Committee to make the data available and just four days later the feed is here. Not everyone is happy about about the information being made publicly available like this, however.
Last week Politico ran a three page story about the issue, citing a number of interesting arguments against XML transparency.
John Wonderlich, policy director for the Sunlight Foundation, told Politico that the reason he's been given for the lack of XML feeds is this: "the secretary of the Senate has cited a general standing policy ... that they're not supposed to present votes in a comparative format, that senators have the right to present their votes however they want to...it's pretty bad."
Dave Lundy, acting executive director of the Chicago-based Better Government Association, told Politico again that: "It's a strategy to make information hard to find and hard to digest and hard to analyze...Call me a cynic, but I don't ... think [government entities] deserve the benefit of the doubt. We have ample experience to know that people try to hide information, even in plain sight."
Apparently, those problems were washed away this week by the tides of open technology. The Washington Post has offered something similar to what's now available for some time, but there's something to be said for what we hope will be a big, fat, official pipe of data.
We learned of the news this morning when New York Times technologist, Derek Willis, celebrated mention of the news by Rob Pierson, who yesterday began a new job leading new media initiatives for the House Democratic Caucus. The Sunlight Foundation said last week that neither the House nor the senate "maintain any reasonable database of lawmaker votes." The House of Representatives does release their votes in structured format, though.
Willis points out that the new Senate data feeds aren't perfect; the absence of Bioguide ID information linking Senators' names to their online profiles creates an unnecessary additional step for developers, for example.
It's exciting news none-the-less. "It's good to see high profile senators from both parties behind this," says John Musser, founder of the web's leading mashup and API directory, Programmable Web. "Those first steps are often the hardest. That is, just getting understanding of the value, getting buy-in and then having the data accessible in a developer friendly format. The next logical step is to wrap it in an API; having the XML is closer to having an RSS feed, there's not a lot of developer control of what data to retrieve. An API typically gives much more control over what data gets retrieved. Like 'give me all roll call votes for January 2009', versus 'here's the last 20 roll call votes.' Or all roll call votes by a specific senator, etc."
Musser says that he's seeing a broad movement towards increased access to government data. That work is being done by both official sources like this new Senate feed and the data-centric Recovery.org and by outside organizations like the Sunlight Foundation and the New York Times, work Musser is tracking closely.
What's left to open up? Check out, for example, this list of the 8 most desirable but unavailable government data sets, per Willis from the NYT. As of today, one of those can be checked off the list.
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Great news. Will be interesting to see the mashups and to watch which parliaments around the world dare to follow this step towards more transparency.
Now we just need to make the lawmakers use Git (or w/e) in order to edit pending legislation. Let's see how much earmarks are used when legislation is under version control.
Posted by: coldbrew
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May 5, 2009 12:04 PM
Ah, xml. Is there anything it can't do?
This is great news. More transparency is good for everybody (except those with something to hide of course). ;-)
what would really make this cool is if they could be linked to the full texts of bills that have been passed already as well.
Then to connect it to attendance records to show which members were absent from duty-show which votes were cast for them illegally ;-)
i'd like to see some sort of link between lobbying efforts and votes
Posted by: Sean Canton
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May 5, 2009 3:49 PM
Just fyi, C. Anaman - proxy voting isn't permitted in either the House or Senate. If you're not there, you don't vote. As for absentee, we've got that covered in the NYT Congress API :-)
This is genuinely great, but it needs a little more work. The main feed is a list of votes, composed more or less as follows:
Vote date and time
Links to appropriate documents
Whether the bill was rejected or accepted
Number of yeas
Number of nays
A plain-text description
It turns out that there is a separate XML feed for each bill, which tells you exactly who voted each way, but this isn't linked from the main index feed. (You can see a sample bill feed over here.) So you've got to make an educated guess about the URI, which is dangerous if they decide to change the system.
As an aside, I'd love to see a similar feed for draft bills, which lists modifications as they go through the legislative system. Subscribing to my cause of choice and then being notified when something gets removed or added would be very interesting and probably extremely useful.
realy good articles from today i read every day
http://officialtech.com
The vote XML contains "lis_member_id" but I'm not sure how you turn that into more well-formatted data.
Also, don't amazon and Yahoo have large stores of public information. I'd like to get this from them, since this will surly be swamped by requests during contentious votes.
*Surely (heh)
Krispijn beek, Canada dared to "follow" this move around a month ago. http://www.thestar.com/News/Canada/article/620435 (the mainstream article doesn't mention it, but there's an XML source available).
Wermuller: Great "idea" ( "As an aside, I'd love to see a similar feed for draft bills, which lists modifications as they go through the legislative system."), but if you read my comment you'd see I wrote the same exact thing with a bit more color.
Posted by: coldbrew
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May 6, 2009 7:33 AM
I created a C# library to access the XML API from .NET applications. Here's a sample website created using the library, http://www.16particles.com/senatevotes
The source code will be available at http://senatevotes.codeplex.com
US Senate Votes Now Available in XML - Bring on The Mashups! http://bit.ly/EEXJC [from http://twitter.com/marshallk/statuses/1708395061]
Posted by: Marshall Kirkpatrick
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May 24, 2009 10:44 AM
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I like it. Very much. And I can see how it has grown organically from where you where yesterday (and from before that too) which is cool.