What’s Next in 2017?

 Posted on January 31, 2017  |  James Turk Turk

As of last week, we’re collecting current data again for all in-session state legislatures. (This includes 48 of the 50 states, as well as DC and Puerto Rico; Florida begins their main 2017 session in March, and Louisiana doesn’t start until April.) This isn’t the first time we’ve gone through this massive start-of-session undertaking, but each time we’re floored by the amazing support from our community. We’d like to extend a huge thank-you to everyone that chipped in to get us here: since the start of November, there have been over 300 code commits from a dozen contributors, and we’ve received over $7,000 for our general fund from over 50 donors. [Read More]

2017 New Year Update

 Posted on January 2, 2017  |  Miles Watkins

Phew! We’ve been working hard over the holidays, and are pleased to report that Open States is now serving up-to-date data for 20 state legislatures. Our initial plan was to have a set of 11 states ready for you by January 3. Unfortunately, some of these states’ websites haven’t yet been fully updated for the 2017 session, including Ohio, DC, and Massachusetts. Waylaid without their data, we focused instead on bringing up as many states as possible, including most legislatures with 2017-session information hosted. [Read More]

Scraper Timeline Update

 Posted on December 12, 2016  |  Miles Watkins

We’re excited to announce that over the coming days, we’ll be able to start reactivating some state scrapers to collect up-to-date legislative data. We plan to turn on nearly a dozen states in our first round: California, Georgia, Maine, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas and Washington DC. These are some of the earliest states to begin their 2017 legislative sessions, and together include over 40% of the US population. [Read More]

Our First Month

 Posted on December 8, 2016  |  James Turk

It’s been just over a month since we took over ownership of Open States and we wanted to give you an update on how things are going. First off, we’d like to thank you all for your contributions to our ongoing General Support Fundraiser; over the past month, we’ve received dozens of donations totaling over $4,000! This is incredible, and we’ll be putting together a donor’s page by the end of the year thanking everyone who publicly supported the mission of Open States. [Read More]

Why Open States?

 Posted on November 3, 2016  |  Miles Watkins

originally published November 3, 2016 We announced earlier this week that Open States is now being maintained by the original creators of the project, a community of Sunlight Foundation alumni and other volunteers. After a year of scant staffing culminating in the closure of Sunlight Labs, we expect that getting Open States fully operational again will take a significant effort, and we know from experience that maintaining the menagerie of scrapers into the future isn’t easy either. [Read More]

Adopting Open States

 Posted on November 1, 2016  |  James Turk

As the Sunlight Foundation announced today, Open States is going to be passed along to us, a group of Sunlight alumni, with the goal of turning it into an independent, self-sustaining project. We’re extremely grateful to Kat Duffy and everyone else at Sunlight for helping us to get to this point, and wanted to take some time today to explain who we are, what our plan is, and what we need from you in order to have Open States succeed. [Read More]

Open States Transparency Report Card

 Posted on March 11, 2013  |  James Turk

This post originally appeared at https://sunlightfoundation.com/2013/03/11/openstates-report-card/ but has moved here for posterity. Today we’re making available our Transparency Report Card, a byproduct of the work we did in producing Open States. In the course of writing scrapers for all 50 state legislatures, our Open States team and volunteers spent a lot of time looking at state legislative websites and struggling with the often inadequate information made available. Impossibly difficult to navigate sites, information going missing and gnarly PDFs of tabular data have become daily occurrences for those of us working on Open States. [Read More]

Open States Launch: Find & Follow Your State Capitol

 Posted on February 14, 2013  |  Nicko Margolies

This post originally appeared at https://sunlightfoundation.com/2012/08/01/check-out-the-open-states-beta-site/ and is replicated here for posterity. After more than four years of work from volunteers and a full-time team here at Sunlight we’re immensely proud to launch the full Open States site with searchable legislative data for all 50 states, D.C. and Puerto Rico. Open States is the only comprehensive database of activities from all state capitols that makes it easy to find your state lawmaker, review their votes, search for legislation, track bills and much more. [Read More]

Open States Beta Launch

 Posted on August 1, 2012  |  Nicko Margolies

This post originally appeared at https://sunlightfoundation.com/2012/08/01/check-out-the-open-states-beta-site/ and is replicated here for posterity. A view of the Open States beta site on the District of Columbia page. If you don’t read the Sunlight Labs blog as religiously as I do (you should!), you might miss that our Open States project now has a public beta site up and running. Users can find who their state reps are, their voting record and contact information, the most recent actions taken by the legislature and search the full text of current and past bills. [Read More]

A New Face for Open States

 Posted on July 27, 2012  |  James Turk

This post originally appeared at https://sunlightfoundation.com/2012/07/27/a-new-face-for-openstates/ but has been replicated here for posterity. Links may not have been preserved. Wonder what the Open States team has been working on since we finished our initial goal of providing information for all 50 states back in March? As promised, we’ve been focusing on a new OpenStates.org and expanding our API to support full text search and we’re finally ready to show you the results. [Read More]