Open States progress report, February 2

 Posted on February 2, 2018  |  Miles Watkins

Hi all! As promised, touching base with a quick update on my Open States progress from the past couple weeks. Our legislator and bill scrapers are now fully-functioning, pulling in new data nightly. Only Arkansas and Connecticut remain deactivated, since their legislative sessions haven’t yet begun, and their websites haven’t published pre-filed bills. As always, you can view Open States scraper status using our Bobsled tool: My other focus has been updating our legislative boundary lookup, which powers a popular API endpoint and the openstates. [Read More]

Using state flags as Slack emoji

 Posted on January 22, 2018  |  Miles Watkins

Want to rep your home state in Slack? Or travel around a lot, and want to use your Slack status to represent your location? Want to react to a friend’s message, but can’t find a way to say “that’s sooo Kansas”? (Or, run an open-source project and need a cute way to refer to individual states across the country? ;) ) I got you. Hop over to my GitHub repository and you can load all 50 state flags (plus 6 territories’) into your Slack, as custom emoji! [Read More]

Scraper status report for the 2018 sessions

 Posted on January 19, 2018  |  Miles Watkins

January’s always a busy time for Open States, as new legislative sessions are sworn in across the country. I’ve been hard at work making sure that our scrapers receive prompt fixes, as well as making manual data corrections as old legislators retire. Our scraper-status dashboard, http://bobsled.openstates.org/ Right now, we’re in a great place. Thanks to 70 code commits in the past two weeks, 42 of our 52 state scrapers are running smoothly. [Read More]

Bringing on Support for the 2018 Legislative Sessions

 Posted on January 9, 2018  |  James Turk

I’m excited to announce that Miles Watkins, a fellow member of the Open States core team, will be working on the project professionally during 2018’s most legislatively-active months. Between now and late March, Miles will dedicate most of his work week to supporting Open States, especially by improving scraped data quality and building out the infrastructure of the new openstates.org and the geospatial components of the API. Open States had no paid development staff in 2017, and our success relied on over a thousand volunteer hours from Miles, myself, and the rest of our contributors. [Read More]

The new openstates.org: a sneak peek

 Posted on December 2, 2017  |  Miles Watkins

The current Open States website has served us well. It’s a crucial gateway for citizens to track, search, and learn about their representatives and bills, and receives hundreds of thousands of hits per month when legislatures are in session. But at six years old, the interface is starting to show its age, in both usability and visual design. Most significantly, openstates.org is not mobile-responsive, a bad experience for smartphone and tablet users. [Read More]

Open States in 2018 and Beyond

 Posted on December 1, 2017  |  James Turk

Open States will soon enter its tenth year as a project and second year as an independent entity. We wanted to take some time to reflect, and announce some changes that we’ll be making in 2018. We’re quite proud of all we accomplished in 2017. We focused on migrating the project to new & improved infrastructure, new data quality tools as part of our Google Summer of Code participation, and building relationships that will hopefully ensure Open States’ sustainability well into the future. [Read More]

Introducing the Upcoming Open States GraphQL API

 Posted on November 30, 2017  |  James Turk

The Open States API is arguably the most important part of the project after the scrapers. The API was launched in 2010 and now sees millions of requests a week. Today we’re announcing experimental availability of the Open States GraphQL API, our intended successor to the existing API. You can start experimenting w/ the API today: check out the alpha documentation or dive in! This API is currently in an early alpha state. [Read More]

Google Summer of Code 2017 Final Update

 Posted on August 30, 2017  |  Hitesh Garg

Hello everyone! I’m finally wrapping up my Google Summer of Code project. It was a very successful journey, and I’m extremely happy that I got to work with an organization like Open States. I would like to thank my mentors Miles and James for providing me guidance to successfully complete the project. Here’s a summary of what I produced: Overview The purpose of this project was to build Open Civic Data administrative data tools, and additionally to help with the pupa-ization of existing scrapers. [Read More]

Open States Data Availability Survey

 Posted on August 20, 2017  |  James Turk

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. [Read More]

Google Summer of Code — Data Quality Tools Update

 Posted on July 31, 2017  |  Hitesh Garg

Hitesh has been working with us as part of Google Summer of Code. Prior updates: intro, first update. Hello everyone! A lot of work was done this month and hence the third blog post. So continuing from my last blog post, here’s a quick overview of what’s been accomplished so far: Introduced a new data quality check to capture if there are too many people associated with a post or too few people associated with a post. [Read More]