Design considerations and questions

[James McKinney]

I've started compiling some notes on design considerations for OpenStates data on the Billy wiki: https://github.com/sunlightlabs/billy/wiki/Design-considerations Most are handled well on OpenStates.org. However, some bills have very long titles, e.g. http://openstates.org/sc/bills/2013-2014/S211/

Q1. My understanding of a companion bill is when the upper and lower house introduce similar/identical bills. However, eight bills have up to three companions, to make two networks of four companions (see below for one network). Another 44 bills have two companions, which doesn't divide evenly - I added a check to my MongoDB scripts [1], and 571 bills have companions that do not refer to them as companions. Anyway, what does it mean when a bill has 2-3 companions?

http://openstates.org/ny/bills/2011-2012/S5786/

http://openstates.org/ny/bills/2011-2012/S7790/

http://openstates.org/ny/bills/2011-2012/A8465/

http://openstates.org/ny/bills/2011-2012/A10785/

1. https://github.com/opengovernment/opengovernment-app/blob/master/script/sanity/foreign-keys.js#L73

Unrelated, but I noticed that some states have iframe breakers, e.g. try clicking "View latest bill text" on http://openstates.org/az/bills/49th-1st-regular/SB1002/ I also found a bill with 1533 actions! http://openstates.org/il/bills/95th/HB3866/

James

[Wayne Bertsch]

They are not necessarily "Companion" bills, they could be similar bills.  Similar bills may have a statute and/or subject matter in common, but that may be all.  Companion bill usually address the "identical" statute or subject precisely with only the difference be some wording or the construction of the particular statute.

Most websites differentiate between the two.

Hope this helpful.  My background is legislative process.

Wayne

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[Thom Neale]

Companion bills are tricky in New York, and nomenclature in general is kooky and backwards there, too. For example, NY is the only state I know of that issues new bill_id's for each version of a bill. 

But onto companion bills. If you visit the first bill you cited on the Assembly's site (http://assembly.state.ny.us/leg/?default_fld=&bn=S07790&term=2011&Summary=Y&Actions=Y), you'll see that the actions are weirdly staggered on the page. The last unindented action says the bill was substituted by another bill, which eventually passed. This substitution phenomenon is a dark magic process that even people who work in the NY legislature have a hard time explaining. But in NY, a companion bill is called a "same-as" bill if it's substantively identical to another bill. And because bills can arbitrarily be substituted in place of one another, it's likely a NY bill can have an unlimited number of same-as bills. That's the best explanation I can offer, and since we're talking about NY, I have to end this explanation with a disclaimer that everything I have said might be false and make no sense. There's almost no way to get a straight answer from them on this, unfortunately, but the gist is that you can't assume (at least in NY) that a bill will only have 1 companion bill. I'd be more than happy to connect you with someone more knowledgeable in the Legislature if you're interested in getting better answers to your (extremely valid) inquiry.

We have a bug filed on Arizon's iframe breakers..http://code.google.com/p/openstates/issues/detail?id=698&q=state%3DArizona&colspec=ID%20Status%20Priority%20Milestone%20Component%20State%20Owner%20Summary

And we should definitely be truncating bill summaries, evidently!! Filing a bug on that now...

[James McKinney]

Thanks, Thom! That does clarify a lot.