Hacking Congress

lousyd writes "Paul Ford, a writer and web developer, has kicked off a new column called 'Hacking Congress' on the O'Reilly xml.com web site. The inaugural article, "Screenscraping the Senate", discusses what he hopes to achieve and some of his initial work on turning publicly available information on U.S. Senators into XML data."

Someone point Mr. Ford to opengov

[iamcadaver]

opengov.us [opengov.us]

Re:Someone point Mr. Ford to opengov

[Anonymous Coward]

Apparently you failed to RTFA or you would have noticed that he links directly to The Open Government Information Awareness project.

Re:Someone point Mr. Ford to opengov

[iamcadaver]

It's funny, laugh.

www.opengov.us currently miss-gurgitates XML, instead of HTML, to your browser.

How long before he gets arrested?

[dcocos]

Using the phrase "Hacking Congress", is probably a terrorist act. I'm pretty sure that when I drive by the Capitol, my car would get extra scrutiny if that book was in my passenger seat.

{OT} but I've got Karma to burn And for those unfamilar with the policies in DC, every car that goes within two blocks of the Capitol Building is now searched, which is a major traffic issue seeing as Independence Ave, passes with in this zone and is (rather used to be) one the fastest ways though the city, but now with the every car must be searched issue is a pain in the ass and a traffic nightmare, let alone probably pretty close to violating the 4th Amendment.

Re:How long before he gets arrested?

[Tyndmyr]

I'll vouch for that. I live in the area and tried driving there once...I'll never do it again. A huge area is boarded up around the white house as well...tough as heck to get a good picture. Dunno if its intentional or not, but it certainly wouldn't surprise me. As for being searched, Id suggest you carry not one, but several books with titles referencing hacking, terrorism, and weapons. If you've got a lisenced weapon, carry it! Im sure they wont give a law-abiding citizen any grief.

Will there be...

[Guppy06]

... an "Owned by RIAA/MPAA" tag involved?

He's not hacking

[Anonymous Coward]

Not in any real sense of the word. Hacking, in the old sense, is to approach something with playful cleverness and invent your way around problems. This guy is just marking up text, which is neither playful, nor clever, nor inventive. Bah humbug!

Publicly available data... so?

[192939495969798999]

There's a ton of publicly available data that I'm not sure would do anyone much more good in any format. i.e. you can get a copy of the fiscal budget of the USA, but I'm not sure an XML version is much better than the deforesting hardcopy... which is page after page of staggeringly large numbers in miniscule print, identified with really, really obscure allocation categories. (~63 meg download, have fun!)
http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/fy2005 /

Misleading title

[Quinn_Inuit]

I thought this was another Diebold-related article.

He's right, *.senate.gov sites are a mess.

[dameron]

I've recently publish a political parody site composed of haiku coupled with public domain information gathered from the various .gov and .mil sites on the net.

I have to agree with the article that the senate sites are some of the homeliest hodgepodges of html I've seen since I typed "+Goth site:geocities.com" into google. Culling information for my site (which I'll plug here: www.dailyhaiku.com [dailyhaiku.com] has been difficult and exacerbated by a lack of consistent presentation cross government site (*.senate.gov sites are particulary awful).

In a completely selfish way I'd love it if all images on government sites were tagged in valid xml with copyright information, date and time, subjects, location, etc. As it is I have to guess whether the pictures I appropriate are under copyright or public domain, and I'm just waiting for Zell Miller to send me a letter complaining about that picture of him and that scimitar.

It looks like this kind of project could make sites like mine more viable and enhance the public's access to government work (which is mostly in the public domain if created by federal employees as part or their work duties).

-dameron

--- DailyHaiku.com [dailyhaiku.com] saying more in 17 syllables than Big Media says all day.

theyworkforyou.com

[david.given]

...is a site that does much the same sort of thing for the UK government. It's a screen-scraping front end to Hansard; Hansard is the official record of pretty much everything that goes on in parliament, ever. The data's all available online but in an extremely inaccessible manner [the-statio...fice.co.uk].

They Work For You [theyworkforyou.com] indexes, collates and cross-references it all. You can do keyword searches across all speeches and debates. It will let you do such things as look up your MP by postcode, find their speeches, see their track record (my MP [theyworkforyou.com] rebels against her party fairly frequently, for example), and comment. You can attach comments practically anywhere. They provide a public forum where you can discuss what your government says, as they say it.

It's cross-referenced to all kinds of other political resources on the 'net; it has RSS feeds for just about everything --- it is deeply, deeply cool, and a genuinely important resource to anyone interested in UK politics. Oh, yeah, and it's all open source, of course.

You could do far, far worse to adopt something similar.

Re:theyworkforyou.com

[josepha48]

Any ideas if they make their software available for download? It would be nice to be able to do that for my local city government. I'm sure alot of people would like to be able to track what goes on in their government.

Tech thing?

[the_skywise]

Why is this marked under Politics? If he was trying to use this to present a political viewpoint yeah, but he's just trying to route some information in a more efficient fashion...

I suppose next you'll put stories about people trying to get Linux adopted for government use as politics... (Wait... Bill Gates WOULD see that as political...)

RSS feed on voting?

[Piquan]

As for myself, I think it'd be good to have an RSS feed for votes. I'd like to be able to watch the bills as they're voted on, and how my senator voted (all this goes for the House too). Ideally, it should include information on the bill #, title, and abstract; how my senator voted, and the vote's outcome; and for bonus points include information in the feed about how long the bill was debated on the floor (so you can note contriversial ones), how long the text of the bill is, and the top N words used in the text of the bill, from a list of keywords ("military", "law enforcement", "copyright", etc), all just so you can take special note of bills that are more significant to you.

I think that being able to get an overall sense of how my senator votes would be a very good thing. It'd be nice to get this information to the public. It seems that most people have no idea how their congresscritters vote. I think if we make that information trivial to see, it'll be a Good Thing.

I've got a mental picture of a scrolling vote bar on every geeks' desktop, and every now and then our congressional representatives get a bunch of "T4I5 V073 SUXX0RZ!" emails.

Re:RSS feed on voting?

[taubz]

I am working on a website that does some of this and more, with a somewhat "open" XML backend. Bill status, voting records, statistics on representatives, text of debates on the House/Senate floors, email updates, RSS feeds....

The site is done, but I'm working on finding an affordable colocation solution. Should be up in about 1 to 2 months, unless someone steps forward with free colocation for me.

Stay tuned.

GovStat Project at UNC and UMD

[Potlucker]

this project aims to bring visualization and understanding to the masses through the statistics coming from the US government.

http://www.ils.unc.edu/govstat/ [unc.edu]