GovTrack Wiki

Projects

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Here are some possible improvements to GovTrack that you, as a coder, might be able to work on:

Contents

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Scraping more data

  • Committee and conference reports, and tying them into the relevant bills
  • Earmark data from Taxpayers for Common Sense and EarmarkWatch.org
  • Scouring for news articles relevant to legislation
  • Scraping some general information about committees, and organizing some historical data
  • See what's on speaker.gov and in the Weekly Leader for tracking legislation about to get activity
  • CBO report fetching keeps breaking. Talk to CBO about getting a machine-processable list of all reports in a stable format.
  • OMB-SAP report fetching is probably broken.
  • Bug report: <If a member appears more than once on one of your pages from the Congressional Record, your feed excerpts the beginning of the last time that person appears on that page instead of the first. So, instead of getting the introduction to what the members have to say, you often end up with just something like, "I yield the floor" which is not particularly helpful.>
  • Bill actions in committees may not be ordered properly. See email from DRM to JT 3/20/07.
  • Bill actions aren't labeled with whether they occur in the House or Senate.
  • Congressional Record parsing bugs, see http://www.govtrack.us/congress/record.xpd?id=110-h20070306-79
  • Nominations
  • Personal financial disclosures, and see if we can re-open discussion with LegiStorm [1]
  • Election results: http://www.fec.gov/pubrec/fe2006/federalelections2006.shtml How safe a district is each rep in?
  • Organizing historical scanned documents (bills etc.) listed at sites linked from http://www.govtrack.us/formoreinfo.xpd
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Parsing bill text

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Data analysis

  • Visualizations of legislation language and evolution
  • Visualization of legislative statistics, generation of new statistics and charts, finding oddities in the data
  • An automated way to summarize a legislator's performance, including what issues he's worked on. Many Legislative Lobbyist Organizations rate Legislator's performance based on their special Interest. More importantly we should summarize a legislator's performance according to his/her constituents views.
  • Showing some earmark related statistics: total $$$$ allocated
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Fixing site problems

  • Redoing the implementation of the site design so it works better in Internet Explorer.
  • CBO issues updated reports on bills. We need to be able to store multiple reports per bill and get updates as appropriate.
  • Remove the OpenID logins but add RPXNow 3rd party logins
  • DONE (JT) Improving the look and usefulness of the embeddable widgets: Let users choose colors, etc.
  • Clean up the committee pages, make it easier to sift through legislation and navigate members
  • Make the website fully compliant with accessibility standards
  • Get images for all members of congress. Historical images would be nice too. Scan old publications of the Congressional Directory if it's not on bioguide! They're in libraries.
  • Improve site responsiveness (and decrease load on server): Hold some more things in memory? Improve Mono's XSLT engine? Simplify XSLT templates? Different handling of feeds?
  • Remove all uses of the old "date" attribute (Perl time, seconds since 1/1/1970) in the various data XML files and replace them with uses of the newer "datetime" attribute (in the readable ISO format).
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Improving site features

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Bills:

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Representatives

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Miscellaneous

  • Our own Daily Digest type of page (see the Daily Digest on THOMAS).
  • Better navigation of Congressional Record. Navigate from section to section. More hyperlinking. Integration with video.
  • DONE (JT) Show on the votes pages the time the vote took place
  • Forums or other mediums for constructive discussion, but something unique
  • Procedural actions need explanations. On vote pages, this is the vote type or question that is displayed. On bill pages, this is the last action (or if we show more actions, then those).
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Supporting Real World Processes

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The Legislative Process:

  • Draft an End to End Process flow
  • Illustrate how Govtrack supports the Legislative Process
  • Create a Bill Writing Wiki that proposals can be created, promoted, variated, and supported by the public and sent to relevant committee chairman if promoted enough.
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The Electoral Process:

  • Illustrate the Electoral Process and how the Legislative efforts and success of Congress Members is (should be) a key criteria for re-election.
  • Illustrate how Govtrack supports the Local Constituencies Performance Review of their individual Legislators work.
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Community Organizing

  • Start organizing the community by issue area and district.
  • Work with MixedInk.org to do community letters to Congress.
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Extending the site to new areas

  • U.S. Code: Show how the code would be amended by legislation not yet enacted (http://www.statutelaw.gov.uk/Home.aspx)
  • Work with Carl Malamud on getting the Code of Federal Regulations into a usable form.
  • Think about what we could do for the U.S. Code, CFR, the register, and judicial documents that other sites don't.
  • State-level legislation and tracking


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Notes

I (Josh) am more than happy to help anyone work on these things if you're interested.

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