Senate Opening Up? Offers Up Vote Data In XML Format

from the fun-to-watch dept

Tue, May 5th 2009 5:11pm — Mike Masnick

There's been a big push lately to get the gov't to be a lot more open with its data, and both the new federal government CTO and CIO have spoken up about the importance of opening up more data. While it may take some time, we are starting to see things happen -- and happen quickly in some cases. Apparently, the Senate agreed (despite some reservations) to make the data from Senate votes available in an open XML format, and just a few days later that data is available. This is absolutely a good thing, but the real test will be seeing what people do with this and other open government data sources. It's nice to report on the government doing something right every once in a while....

Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.

Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.

While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.

–The Techdirt Team

Filed Under: data, government, openness, senate, votes, xml

14 Comments

If you liked this post, you may also be interested in...

Reader Comments

Subscribe: RSS

View by: Time | Thread

Bettawrekonize, 5 May 2009 @ 5:17pm

Good, we need a lot more governmental transparency.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Sanketsu, 5 May 2009 @ 5:29pm

What? The Government giving us information? Accurate, usable information?

Wow. Awesome.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
- Anonymous Coward, 5 May 2009 @ 10:57pm
  
  Re:
  Haha, good one! I actually laughed out loud!
  [ link to this | view in chronology ]
Sal, 5 May 2009 @ 5:29pm

Why not...
...link to the actual primary source material? It is very annoying clicking through links to your other posts and news articles. Other than that, good stuff you have here.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
- Dorai Thodla, 5 May 2009 @ 6:21pm
  
  Re: Why not...
  http://xml.gov/ is a good source of most of govt xml (data) initiatives.
  
  Dorai Thodla
  [ link to this | view in chronology ]
  - Sal, 5 May 2009 @ 7:25pm
    
    Re: Re: Why not...
    I usually find this stuff after a short search, but it would be nice if the guy writing the blog linked to more than a news article that also has no link to the source.
    [ link to this | view in chronology ]
Anonymous Coward, 5 May 2009 @ 6:14pm

After clicking through a few links, I was able to find two examples of the information in XML format.

It's nice, but there doesn't seem to be a list of all available roll call votes. I would certainly like to go to www.senate.gov and find a list of the XML files. A quick search on the site did not reveal a list of files.

Also, it would be nice to see the DTD, Schema, or Relax NG information for the files. That way it would be easy to process the information, write XSLT transformations, and otherwise make use of this resource.

Still, this is an excellent first start.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Paul, 5 May 2009 @ 6:18pm

Pointless
Whoop'd f'ing doo. Absolutely useless.

If Congress truly, sincerely cared about transparency, they'd use source control for drafting legislation. I'd love to see them use Subversion to track exactly which congressman inserted that particularly heinous clause into an otherwise normal bill.

That's the kind of transparency we need. Once it's up for a vote, it's way too late to affect change.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
- MattP, 6 May 2009 @ 8:34am
  
  Re: Pointless
  They'd use SourceSafe and you know it!
  
  All kidding aside, it would be great to have change tracking implemented.
  [ link to this | view in chronology ]
Mr Big Content, 5 May 2009 @ 6:22pm

What is this "Ecch-Smell" format?
Sounds like it might raise a stink...
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
joe, 5 May 2009 @ 7:57pm

This is not really news
Every vote, by every congress representative, Senate and House, since 1991, has been online on the Washington post web site since past year when one of my sons programmed it for them.

http://projects.washingtonpost.com/congress/

Further, as you will see there, the votes are analyzed, disected, cross-referenced and summarized by just about any data point you might wish.

You can also see the other amazing data projects he did for them on his blog entry (http://push.cx/2009/washington-post-update) that summarizes his work for them.

Sign me, Proud Father of a fantastic young man.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Joe, 5 May 2009 @ 8:08pm

a correction
After re-reading what I posted, I realize it sounds as if I am saying Peter did the whole WP stuff by himself. If you read his blog entry, you will see that he credits those whose works he added to and those whose prior work and current contributions were essential o his own part. And, the comments on his entry continue a dialog with some of those people.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
Bettawrekonize, 5 May 2009 @ 10:20pm

"If Congress truly, sincerely cared about transparency, they'd use source control for drafting legislation. I'd love to see them use Subversion to track exactly which congressman inserted that particularly heinous clause into an otherwise normal bill.

That's the kind of transparency we need. Once it's up for a vote, it's way too late to affect change."

I COMPLETELY agree!!! We should know EXACTLY how every single person voted. When federal agencies, like the FDA, pass laws there should be COMPLETE transparency over who was responsible for the passage of such laws.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
- Anonymous Coward, 5 May 2009 @ 11:00pm
  
  Re:
  They only just discovered what Emails are .. give them a few centuries and you might get SVN.
  [ link to this | view in chronology ]