Congress will soon launch a beta website that will eventually replace
THOMAS and LIS. The blogpost pasted below should help set the scene. --
Daniel
Looking Forward to the THOMAS Beta
Website<http://sunlightfoundation.com/blog/2012/09/14/thomas-beta-preview/>
by Daniel Schuman <http://sunlightfoundation.com/people/dschuman/>Sept. 14,
2012, 9:30 a.m.
http://sunlightfoundation.com/blog/2012/09/14/thomas-beta-preview/

In the near future, Congress is expected to release a major upgrade to its
aging legislative information website THOMAS. The long-overdue update is
part of a much larger effort to "enhance the effectiveness of
mission-critical
systems<http://www.loc.gov/about/strategicplan/strategicplan2011-2016.pdf>,"
a response to significant public and internal pressure to improve
congressional efficiency and transparency. The launch of "THOMAS Beta" is
the first step towards developing what the Library of Congress describes as
a completely "modern legislative information system" that will replace
THOMAS and Congress' more sophisticated internal legislative tracking
website "LIS" in FY 2014. Both THOMAS and LIS will stay online alongside
the beta website for several years.

While THOMAS Beta has been shown to stakeholders inside Congress, as far as
I am aware there has been no formal engagement process with the public to
identify specifications, discuss wireframes, or generally make sure the
site meets the public's needs. It is expected that such conversations will
occur after the launch as the site is built out. My understanding is that
the majority of the work on THOMAS Beta thus far has been to modernize the
underlying information architecture, with many of the new bells and
whistles and apps to be rolled out over time.

Two years ago, the Sunlight Foundation gathered ideas from the community
for upgrading THOMAS<http://www.opencongress.org/wiki/THOMAS_bulk_data_access#Ideas_for_Up...>,
and in July 2010 we highlighted three additional
ideas<http://sunlightfoundation.com/blog/2010/07/29/apps-for-thomas-3-wishes/>,
but the primary recommendation continues to be requiring all of the
underlying information behind THOMAS to be made available to the public "in
bulk<http://sunlightfoundation.com/policy/documents/public-access-legislat...>."
 In other words, all of the legislative information behind THOMAS and LIS
should be made available in a way that's easy for machines to understand so
that developers can more easy and reliably build tools like
OpenCongress<http://www.opencongress.org/>
, GovTrack <http://www.govtrack.us/>, the Congress Android
App<http://sunlightfoundation.com/projects/congress-for-android/>,
andScout <https://scout.sunlightfoundation.com/> that re-use information in
clever new ways.

The House leadership has
endorsed<http://sunlightfoundation.com/blog/2012/06/06/major-transparency-mile...>
the
idea of bulk access and established a nascent bulk data task force, but not
everyone inside Congress is fully on board with the effort. From an
external perspective, we have requested that public stakeholders be
included on the bulk data task force, which is being coordinated by the
House Clerk's office. Along similar lines, for several years we and others have
asked the Library of
Congress<http://sunlightfoundation.com/policy/documents/30-orgs-call-bulk-acce...>
to
form an advisory group on THOMAS (as it is responsible for overseeing
THOMAS), and we hope the impending launch of THOMAS Beta will make this a
reality.

It's important to understand the context in which the THOMAS Beta rolls
out. In the last year, the House of Representatives released an innovative
legislative information
portal<http://sunlightfoundation.com/blog/2012/06/06/major-transparency-mile...>
, docs.house.gov, which provides bulk access to House data in a way that is
more timely than THOMAS, and will soon provide materials from House
committees in addition to documents concerning floor proceedings. The House
also held three
conferences<http://sunlightfoundation.com/blog/2012/02/02/benchmarks-for-measurin...>
on
legislative transparency and created the bulk data task force. In addition,
more than 85 organizations will release a declaration on parliamentary
openness <http://www.openingparliament.org/> in Rome this Saturday at the
World e-Parliament Conference that endorses providing information in open
and structured formats. And the free, open-source parliamentary information
system-in-a-box Bungeni <http://www.bungeni.org/> is continuing to gain
steam around the world.

We are eagerly looking forward to the launch of THOMAS Beta, and will pay
particularly close attention to whether the Library of Congress, which has
general responsibility for the project, has built a system that uses modern
techniques -- such as bulk access and APIs -- to make information available
to the public.
 Tags:

Daniel

Daniel Schuman
Director | Advisory Committee on Transparency<http://transparencycaucus.org/>
Policy Counsel | The Sunlight Foundation <http://sunlightfoundation.com/>
o: 202-742-1520 x 273 | c: 202-713-5795 | @danielschuman