Open States Data Availability Survey

Help evaluate your state’s legislative data.

In 2013 the Open States team put together an Open Legislative Data Report Card. The report card ranked states in several categories, helping us provide states feedback and apply pressure to states to improve their data availability. That survey was greatly aided by volunteers helping us evaluate state data sources. We’d like to revisit this for 2017 and once again want to call upon our community for assistance.

We’ve put together a State Data Availability Survey and if you can spare a bit of time and evaluate the data your state makes available, it’d really help us.

Our 2013 legislative data report cardOur 2013 legislative data report card

In addition to helping us score the states this survey also is aimed at helping us ensure that our various state scrapers are as up-to-date as possible. We don’t always immediately find out when states make better data available, by doing an audit of all states we’ll hopefully discover better data in a handful of states — helping us further improve our data quality.

(As for which state to evaluate, it is handy to have at least two sets of eyes on a state so don’t worry too much about duplication, but we’ll update this post to indicate when a state has been evaluated.)

So please, take the State Data Availability Survey now — and please, share this post as widely as possible so we can get good coverage of every state.

States Already Evaluated as of 8/29:

  • Florida

  • Hawaii

  • Maryland

  • Massachusetts

  • North Carolina

  • Texas

  • Vermont

  • Virginia

  • Washington