Happy New Year!
This is always the busiest time for the project, as nearly every state begins a new legislative session in the January of an odd-numbered year.
Most states will be back in session by January 9th, and nearly all of them by January 16th. If you’re unsure when your state starts, there’s a great reference on Ballotpedia. The unfortunate fact is that many states don’t put their data up until the day the session starts, or sometimes later. This means if there are any surprises (a new site, a change to how they publish their bulk data, etc.) we might not know until the session has begun. That means we need to turn states on one-by-one after some basic checking occurs, which takes time.
One caveat, right now we’ve mostly frozen the openstates.org frontend as-is as we do this work. New data will appear in the API (v1 and v2) for now and will appear on openstates.org in the next week or two.
Thanks for your patience as we catch up to the states. If you’re curious if your state is back up & running you can check this sheet. As of January 3rd, our bill scrapers are running again in 28 states and our legislator information is updated in 15.
If you want to help out, or follow along more closely there are two GitHub issues to follow:
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Bill Scrapers openstates/openstates #2681
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Legislator Details openstates/people #38
Things will be moving rapidly in the next two weeks, and we’ll update this every couple of days with the latest numbers.
We’re excited to get through this turnover period so we can start rolling out some more of the exciting features we have in store for 2019.