Does anyone have a nice generalized shapefile of the current Congress? The National Atlas version is so full of detail that every island off the coast is a...
1035
Eric Mill
konklone
Dec 2, 2011 6:02 pm
GovTrack provides KML versions of every state and Congressional District, and they've been reduced in granularity to be small and easily usable: ...
1036
Margie Roswell
margieroswell
Dec 2, 2011 7:55 pm
Thanks. A couple of drawbacks: 1. How to combine them into one larger KML file? 2. How will they look, given this note: Note that you generally cannot combine...
1037
Josh Tauberer
tauberer
Dec 2, 2011 8:04 pm
Yeah the GovTrack KMLs won't combine perfectly because the size-reduction process was done district by district, and so simplifications on one border don't...
1038
Eric Mill
konklone
Dec 2, 2011 8:33 pm
So in other words, you could combine them, they'd just look all jiggly at the edges and have slight overlaps. The only way to avoid that is to preserve all the...
1039
Josh Tauberer
tauberer
Dec 10, 2011 5:51 pm
Hi, everyone. Bill text is updating now. Thanks to whoever here forwarded the problem on to GPO --- I got an email from someone at GPO who pointed me to their...
1040
Eric Mill
konklone
Dec 10, 2011 7:10 pm
I've been looking exactly for sitemap files like that! Would you mind sharing how we can find the different sitemaps? For example, I guessed at the URL for the...
1041
Josh Tauberer
tauberer
Dec 10, 2011 7:13 pm
Here's all I know about the sitemaps. (I removed Blake's contact info so he doesn't get spam from the archives but am happy to pass it along.) ... Subject:...
1042
jtbates_gmail
Jan 28, 2012 12:19 am
I get the following error on Mac OS 10.6 when I try the example rsync command from http://www.govtrack.us/developers/data.xpd: $ rsync -az --delete...
1043
Josh Tauberer
tauberer
Jan 29, 2012 5:15 pm
After the double colons it should be "govtrackdata" rather than "govtrack." - Josh Tauberer (@JoshData) - GovTrack.us | POPVOX.com http://razor.occams.info |...
1044
tmschmitz01
Feb 22, 2012 11:45 am
I've noticed that the KML files for drawing Congressional districts (listed here: http://www.govtrack.us/embed/googlemaps.xpd) seem to be missing the final...
1045
Josh Tauberer
tauberer
Mar 12, 2012 1:55 am
FYI to anyone tracking Senate votes, two senators changed their vote in roll call #28. The file on GovTrack has been updated. John, writing below & attached,...
1046
Derek Willis
derekpwillis
Mar 12, 2012 2:02 pm
Thanks for this, Josh. We've updated our data for roll call 28 as well. Derek Willis...
1047
Josh Tauberer
tauberer
Mar 23, 2012 2:25 pm
Hi, all. I know I already gave someone a real headache for not giving a heads up and feel bad about that. If you haven't seen, GovTrack is now on "2.0". The...
1048
Francis
francisgavila
Apr 28, 2012 12:40 pm
At least one bill's xml has invalid characters: http://www.govtrack.us/data/us/112/bills/h4517.xml The reason for this is that the source on thomas (maybe...
1049
Josh Tauberer
tauberer
Apr 28, 2012 12:42 pm
Thanks, Francis. I corrected the XML file and the scraper yesterday afternoon, so hopefully the data is now good. And I let my LOC contact know about HR4517...
1050
Francis
francisgavila
May 4, 2012 11:46 pm
I'm looking for machine-readable Bioguide data, in particular the short biographical paragraphs for currently-serving congressmen. I know about bioguide html:...
1051
Eric Mill
konklone
May 5, 2012 12:43 am
I've asked the same question, of Josh, and of people inside Congress. The XML isn't available publicly, and it's not obvious whether or when it will be. ...
1052
Eric Mill
konklone
May 5, 2012 12:46 am
At the bottom of the House Clerk's site <http://clerk.house.gov/>, they list this email address at the bottom to contact them: info.clerkweb@... I...
1053
Josh Tauberer
tauberer
May 11, 2012 4:08 pm
I re-ran my bioguide scraper and updated those files: http://www.govtrack.us/data/us/bioguide1.csv http://www.govtrack.us/data/us/bioguide2.csv ...
1054
Eric Mill
konklone
May 11, 2012 4:13 pm
At the House Legislative Data conference in February, the lady who invented the Bioguide was there, and after the conference she went and fixed a couple of...
1055
Josh Tauberer
tauberer
May 17, 2012 1:07 am
I've put this off just about long enough- GovTrack now has an API! Currently bills and people are included in the API. (Votes and committees will come later if...
1056
Eric Mill
konklone
May 17, 2012 3:40 am
Super awesome, really glad to see this happen. Nice job with the docs, too (and a nice reminder to redo and update my own). Are you using this in anything...
1057
Josh Tauberer
tauberer
May 17, 2012 10:58 am
... Thanks. I drew on a few ideas from RTC, e.g. I made sure the infrastructure I chose (Tasypie) supported __[operator] filtering. ... Not yet. The main...
1058
Eric Mill
konklone
May 17, 2012 3:16 pm
Sweet. Are you going to dive into text search at all? This has become the most useful thing to come out of RTC, though I haven't documented the search methods...
1059
Josh Tauberer
tauberer
May 17, 2012 3:24 pm
Probably, yeah. Right now the API is based on the Django ORM, which hits MySQL. That's not great for search so I have to see if I can switch it transparently...
1060
Eric Mill
konklone
May 17, 2012 3:37 pm
So fun. We had a nice (potential) success story at Sunlight the other day here, where we...
1061
Josh Tauberer
tauberer
May 23, 2012 10:25 pm
... Yeah, that is worth a try. I'm now sorting bills on the advanced search by a modified-prognosis score that just omits any boost that post office bills and...
1062
Eric Mill
konklone
May 23, 2012 10:38 pm
Sorting on prognosis is a cool idea. Does that mean that bills already passed into law will always occur at the top, or the bottom, or...? You are the last...
1063
Josh Tauberer
tauberer
May 23, 2012 10:55 pm
... Yeah this part is weird. The only status taken into account is whether the bill has been reported by committee. So reported bills get a boost. Enacted...
