Open States: 50!

 Posted on March 12, 2012  |  James Turk

This page originally appeared at https://sunlightfoundation.com/2012/03/12/open-states-50/ but has been replicated here for posterity. Three years ago at PyCon 2009, we had the first PyCon Open Government Hackathon. Our big project was Open States (then the 50 State Project). The goal was to begin scraping state legislatures’ websites in the hope of providing a common format for bill metadata across all 50 states. Today, as we kick off the 4th Annual Open Government Hackathon at PyCon we’re extraordinarily happy to announce one of the most significant milestones in the history of Open States: as of today, all 50 states (as well as DC and Puerto Rico) are now supported via our API and bulk downloads. [Read More]

Open States API, 1 Year Later

 Posted on September 12, 2011  |  James Turk

This post originally appeared at https://sunlightfoundation.com/2011/09/12/open-states-api-1-yr-later/ but has been moved here for posterity. Last September we announced the first public release of the Open States API. The API enables programmatic access to all of the key artifacts of the state legislative process. The API currently provides a standard interface to bills, votes, legislators, committees, and events across 36 states, Washington DC, and Puerto Rico. Seeing as it has been a year since this first public release it seems like a good time to check on on where we are today and where we’re going next. [Read More]

Halfway to 50

 Posted on May 6, 2011  |  James Turk

This page originally appeared at https://sunlightfoundation.com/2011/05/06/open-states-halfway/ but has been replicated here for posterity. Today marks an important milestone for the Open State Project: the addition of New York to our list of experimental states brings our total number of supported states to 25 (plus Washington DC). This marks the halfway point on our journey to bring clean, consistent, machine readable legislative information to all 50 states. This means that residents of 25 states (accounting for approximately two-thirds of US citizens) can access their state’s legislative data in a variety of machine readable formats (JSON, XML, CSV) and will soon be benefiting from sites like like OpenGovernment. [Read More]

New Hampshire Opens Its Legislative Data

 Posted on February 3, 2011  |  James Turk

This post originally appeared on https://sunlightfoundation.com/2011/02/03/new-hampshire-open-legislative-data/ but has been moved here for posterity. The New Hampshire General Court (their state legislature) has made an extremely welcome addition to their website in the form of a downloads section. New Hampshire isn’t the first state to offer such a thing: New Jersey has a similar section on their website, and quite a few states like New York and Kansas are introducing APIs to their new legislature websites. [Read More]

Open State Project API

 Posted on September 1, 2010  |  James Turk

This page originally appeared at https://sunlightfoundation.com/2010/09/01/introducing-open-state-project-api/ but has been replicated here for posterity. Over a year ago we announced our intention to build scrapers that would collect and sanitize legislative information from all fifty states, an initiative that is now known as the Open State Project. (formerly the Fifty State Project) Since we put out the proposal we’ve had more than 25 developers contribute code, and we now have scrapers in various states of completion for approximately 30 states. [Read More]

Google Summer of Code 2010: Open States

 Posted on August 30, 2010  |  Gabriel Joel Pérez

This post originally appeared at https://sunlightfoundation.com/2010/08/30/gsoc-2010-openstates/ but has moved here for posterity. Hello! I’m Gabriel, I’m a 4th year student of Computer Engineering from the University of Puerto Rico in Mayagüez. This summer I worked as a GSoC student on developing new scapers for the Open State Project. The states I worked on were Colorado, Hawaii, Washington, Oregon and the territory of Puerto Rico. I really enjoyed the whole experience. The work is very fulfilling as coding in Python is always delightful and fun. [Read More]

Fifty State Project: Redux

 Posted on May 10, 2010  |  James Turk

This post originally appeared at https://sunlightfoundation.com/2010/05/10/fifty-state-project-redux/ but has moved here for posterity. The Fifty State Project is now over a year old and has evolved from a Sunlight Labs side project to a funded endeavor. The project is receiving funding as part of a proposal to provide data for five new state level OpenCongress.org-type sites (being developed by the team at Participatory Politics Foundation). As a result we will soon have three staff members working on the project in addition to a Google Summer of Code student. [Read More]

April 10 2009 Status Report

 Posted on April 10, 2009  |  James Turk

This post originally appeared at https://sunlightfoundation.com/2009/04/10/fifty-states-project-april-10th-status-report/ but has moved here for posterity. Six weeks ago we announced on this blog the Fifty State Project, our ambitious project to begin building scrapers and storing data for all legislative information from all fifty states. At the time this project seemed like a longshot, but almost immediately a community rose to the challenge and there are now more than a dozen contributors and more than thirty states in progress. [Read More]

Our next big goal, The Fifty State Project

 Posted on February 26, 2009  |  Josh Ruihley

This post originally appeared at https://sunlightfoundation.com/2009/02/26/fifty-state-project/ but has moved here for posterity. Those of you who are familiar with Open Congress know that its power lies not in making legislative information available, but instead in how it makes legislation accessible by allowing people to interact with and repurpose what Congress produces. Unfortunately, hurdles remain in creating a better democracy at the local level and shedding light on state legislation. At Sunlight Labs, we’ve been thinking about this problem for a while and now is the time for a fix. [Read More]