[Open-Legislation] Fwd: Sunlight's legislative tracking service

[Daniel Dietrich]

I guess most of you are on the PMO list as well, for those who aren't.

Regards
Daniel



Begin forwarded message:

> From: Eric Mill <eric at sunlightfoundation.com>
> Subject: Sunlight's legislative tracking service
> Date: 21 June 2012 17:34:23 CEST
> To: pmo-network at googlegroups.com
> Reply-To: pmo-network at googlegroups.com
> 
> Hello all,
> 
> In case anyone here is interested - last week, Sunlight released a tracking tool for government activity, called Scout. You can find it here:
> 
> https://scout.sunlightfoundation.com/
> 
> It tracks bills in Congress, speeches made in Congress, bills in any of our state legislatures, and any proposed or final national regulations. We do this through our public APIs, which allow searching over the full text of all of this information.
> 
> Besides keyword searches, if you pick a particular bill, we send notifications of new activity and upcoming floor votes, also using our public APIs of data that we scrape from a variety of sources. More experimentally, there's some advanced tagging features to let you group and share alerts around a topic.
> 
> We're trying to offer something that any citizen can use, and for free, but that professionals will find useful to augment or even replace the expensive pay services they use that do similar things. 
> 
> As an example, a big reason why we did this was because John Wonderlich wanted to follow proposed exemptions to our Freedom of Information Act, by learning whenever a specific legal citation appears in new bills. Because John is a living oracle, he actually caught something this way and we were able to pass on the word to groups working on the bill, and get it changed on the floor of the Senate.
> 
> I'm the lead developer, and I'm happy to go into more detail on the technical side if anyone is interested. The code is open source, but as with much of our stuff, it's not documented in great detail yet.
> 
> -- Eric
> 
> -- 
> Developer | sunlightfoundation.com
> 

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