Thomas Feature Requests?
Rob Pierson
LIS (Legislative Information System, which is a more powerful version only available for hill staffers) is in the process of
adding several new features, including RSS feeds, an XML database for all bills, and they plan on developing web services (an API, from what I understand). Thomas has a nice looking site, but they have lagged behind LIS for several years. In 2003 a bipartisan group of Senators urged improvements to Thomas. In their letter, the Senators noted several examples of LIS's advantages over Thomas. Thomas addressed several of those concerns, but the problem still remains: Thomas remains vastly underpowered in comparison to LIS.
I am meeting with the folks in charge of Thomas tomorrow afternoon to urge the implementation of the changes below. If you have any additional Thomas requests or suggestions, please reply on list.
RSS Feeds: These should be available based on bill subject (iraq feed, etc), as well as a simple chronological list based on bill introduction and recent actions.
XML database: Should be available on a free basis, to allow for other sites to query this official source of data.
Sites like govtrack currently screen scrape thomas for vote info, leading to sometimes inaccurate information. This is especially problematic as other sites then reuse that data on their own sites.
API: It would be great if sites could send a query to thomas about the number of cosponsors of a bill, bill status, names of cosponsor... Is there any other information that is high priority for the API?
UI Improvements: In my opinion, LIS is vastly easier to use than Thomas. For instance, when you search for a bill by number (i.e. HR4) it takes you to a page which asks you which version of the bill you want to look at (1). You then view the bill text (2). At that point you can view the bill summary page (3) for all versions of the bill. From there you can view the CRS (congressional research service) summary of the bill, which is the most useful information about the bill.
Permanent Links: It should be MUCH easier to create permanent links to bills. The first two steps listed in the UI section above use temporary URLs which expire immediately. All pages of Thomas should have permanent links.
More Powerful Searches: As you can see here, http://www.flickr.com/photos/piersonr/sets/72157600053561894/
LIS has MUCH more powerful search capabilities. I see no reason that the public should not have access to a legislative bill search engine that is just as powerful as that available to congressional staff.
Are there any additional features or changes that you'd like to see? (allowing trackbacks would be cool, but I think we may have to wait another few years for something like that) :)
Cheers,
Rob
Steven Clift
etc. - therefore whatever the members and staff need - the engine of
feature demand - the public also gets.
Why not the same concept with Congress?
Steven Clift
E-Democracy.Org
P.S. An idea for Sunlight - commission a feature comparison of free
online services provided by a dozen leading states and compare then with
those offered by Congress. Check out the centrally provided features for
MN House members - they even have podcasts:
http://www.house.leg.state.mn.us/members/housemembers.asp
This should help throw out the idea IMHO that U.S. House/Senate members
should have an option of a one-size-fits-all mega-package of features
that extends the concept of the "member directory" to something digital.
There is no reason a member's office that doesn't maintain there website
should even have there own website - use something like the MN House to
minimize the work.
From:
http://www.ncsl.org/programs/press/webawardhome.htm
September 15, 2006
Minnesota Legislature Wins Award for Top Web Site
Web portal stands out for making democracy user-friendly
DENVER - The National Conference of State Legislatures awarded the
Minnesota Legislature the 2006 Online Democracy Award for their
website's use of design, content and technology in making democracy
user-friendly.
Minnesota's website (http://www.leg.mn) was recognized for its ease of
navigation, advanced searchability and multitude of content. Judges
were particularly impressed with the site's simple design yet advanced
features such as RSS feeds, an impressive youth page and detailed
publications offerings.
"Overall the site seemed to perform strongly in all of the categories we
judged: design, content and technology," the judges wrote. "The site is
highly searchable, simple to navigate and offers lots of useful
publications."
Minnesota is only the second recipient of the Online Democracy Award,
the only national award that exclusively recognizes legislative
websites. To be eligible for the award, a web site must be the official
legislative site developed and maintained by or under the authority of a
state legislature, a legislative chamber or an officially-recognized
legislative partisan caucus.
The Online Democracy Award is sponsored by two of NCSL's staff sections,
the Legislative Information and Communication Staff Section (LINCS) and
the National Association for Legislative Information Technology (NALIT).
NCSL is the bipartisan organization that serves the legislators and
staff of the states, commonwealths and territories. It provides
research, technical assistance and opportunities for policymakers to
exchange ideas on the most pressing state issues and is an effective and
respected advocate for the interests of the states in the American
federal system.
Conor Kenny
Does the LOC administrate the LIS? If so, why not just open the LIS and ditch Thomas? Or at least mirror it.
Conor
Minnesota's website (http://www.leg.mn ) was recognized for its ease of
navigation, advanced searchability and multitude of content. Judges
were particularly impressed with the site's simple design yet advanced
features such as RSS feeds, an impressive youth page and detailed
publications offerings.
"Overall the site seemed to perform strongly in all of the categories we
judged: design, content and technology," the judges wrote. "The site is
highly searchable, simple to navigate and offers lots of useful
publications."
Minnesota is only the second recipient of the Online Democracy Award,
the only national award that exclusively recognizes legislative
websites. To be eligible for the award, a web site must be the official
legislative site developed and maintained by or under the authority of a
state legislature, a legislative chamber or an officially-recognized
legislative partisan caucus.
The Online Democracy Award is sponsored by two of NCSL's staff sections,
the Legislative Information and Communication Staff Section (LINCS) and
the National Association for Legislative Information Technology (NALIT).
NCSL is the bipartisan organization that serves the legislators and
staff of the states, commonwealths and territories. It provides
research, technical assistance and opportunities for policymakers to
exchange ideas on the most pressing state issues and is an effective and
respected advocate for the interests of the states in the American
federal system.
--
Conor Kenny
Congresspedia.org
Peggy Garvin
Rob,
My priorities would be:
--More powerful searches
--RSS feeds
--XML database
Thanks,
Peggy
John Wonderlich
I wonder if Minnesota's system was designed from the ground up as a modern integrated system. It strikes me that it would be much simpler to put a whole new system into place than it is to take large administrative structures (and their individual histories, funding battles, and staked out jurisdictions) and attempt to rearrange them. (I'd love to be proved wrong on that point.)
As to the question of Library of Congress and jurisdiction, part of the issue comes back to CRS, I think. Since the internal LIS is under CRS (I believe), and CRS is tasked only with serving Congress (even though it is part of the LOC), that leaves the greater Library of Congress on its own to provide for the needs of the general public, since public service isn't among CRS's responsiblities.
I wonder why a split ever developed between THOMAS and LIS in the first place. I would assume that priorities in funding made it necessary to upgrade internal house resources first, or perhaps that security concerns made it easier to create separate access systems for legislative data. (anyone know about the history there?)
Whatever the historical reasons are for there being two legislative data access systems, most of them probably don't really apply anymore, given Information Tech's rapid evolution.
From my perspective, permitting public access to well defined areas of LIS would be a great solution, but I do wonder about how feasible that is, given technological, administrative, and political considerations.
As far as more incremental, practical recommendations go, in addition to XML versions of legislative documents and publishing RSS feeds, another THOMAS request from an earlier conversation at Sunlight went as follows: (this was sent to me)
1. When I ask questions of Thomas, I 'd rather not speak to it in the
language of Line Noise.
If I want to know what happened yesterday in Congress, instead of
saying, obscurely,
http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery?&Db=d110&querybd=@OR(@FIELD
(FLD961+20070531)+@FIELD(FLD010+20070531))
I'd say, more directly,
http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery?action-date=20070531
2. When Thomas answers my questions, I'd rather have the option that
it not reply in the language of Line Noise.
When it tells me the sponsor of a bill, I'd rather it not say,
obscurely,
<br><b>Sponsor:</b> <a href="/cgi-bin/bdquery/?
&Db=d110&querybd=@FIELD(FLD003+@4((@1(Rep+Cuellar++Henry))
+01807))">Rep Cuellar, Henry</a>
I'd rather have it say, more directly
<sponsor legislator-id="01807">Rep Cuellar, Henry</sponsor>
John Wonderlich
Program Director
The Sunlight Foundation
(202) 742-1520 ext. 234
Peggy Garvin
John,
Yes, the issue is the separate missions of CRS (serve Congress only) and LC (serve Congress, the American public, and the world). I wouldn’t get too caught up in the history.
Peggy
Patrice McDermott
or participatory functionalities. How about being able to see how
Members voted -- by Member, not by roll call votes? If we are talking
about functionalities, how about being able to communicate with
Committee members who are not your MoC? This has been brought up a
number of times -- with the webmail forms that are used, a member of
the public who does not live in the Rep's district is filtered out.
But communication with members of Committees is part of the
participation process -- most of the key work in Congress is done in
committees and subcommittees. In both of these cases, it is the
decisions of House leadership and the House Admin committee that
prevail.
Patrice
On Jun 3, 1:50 pm, "Rob Pierson" <piers...@gmail.com> wrote:
> What changes would you like to be seen in the next version of Thomas (the
> publicly available website of federal legislation)?
>
> LIS (Legislative Information System, which is a more powerful version only
> available for hill staffers) is in the process of
> adding several new features, including RSS feeds, an XML database for all
> bills, and they plan on developing web services (an API, from what I
> understand). Thomas has a nice looking site, but they have lagged behind LIS
> for several years. In 2003 a bipartisan group of Senators urged improvements
> to Thomas<http://www.senate.gov/%7Egovt-aff/index.cfm?FuseAction=PressReleases....>.
Ian Koski
Good luck Rob!
-----------------------------------------------
Ian Koski, Creative Director
On Deck Communication Studio LLC
www.ondeckstudio.com
-----------------------------------------------
Where Strategy Meets Design
From: Rob Pierson <pier...@gmail.com>
Reply-To: <openhous...@googlegroups.com>
Date: Sun, 3 Jun 2007 12:50:40 -0500
To: <openhous...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: [openhouseproject] Thomas Feature Requests?
LIS (Legislative Information System, which is a more powerful version only available for hill staffers) is in the process of
I am meeting with the folks in charge of Thomas tomorrow afternoon to urge the implementation of the changes below. If you have any additional Thomas requests or suggestions, please reply on list.
RSS Feeds: These should be available based on bill subject (iraq feed, etc), as well as a simple chronological list based on bill introduction and recent actions.
XML database: Should be available on a free basis, to allow for other sites to query this official source of data.
Sites like govtrack currently screen scrape thomas for vote info, leading to sometimes inaccurate information. This is especially problematic as other sites then reuse that data on their own sites.
API: It would be great if sites could send a query to thomas about the number of cosponsors of a bill, bill status, names of cosponsor... Is there any other information that is high priority for the API?
UI Improvements: In my opinion, LIS is vastly easier to use than Thomas. For instance, when you search for a bill by number (i.e. HR4) it takes you to a page which asks you which version of the bill you want to look at (1). You then view the bill text (2). At that point you can view the bill summary page (3) for all versions of the bill. From there you can view the CRS (congressional research service) summary of the bill, which is the most useful information about the bill.
Permanent Links: It should be MUCH easier to create permanent links to bills. The first two steps listed in the UI section above use temporary URLs which expire immediately. All pages of Thomas should have permanent links.
Chris Kinnan
Conor Kenny
Because of the expenditure already being made by the government to code these bills and the fact that we can use the information through GovTrack, etc., on many different projects, the community of users of Thomas data have a very vested interest in this system and how to make it more useful. For example, on OpenCongress you can "see related bills" on a bill by searching for other bills that have the same issue coding.
There have been rumors of the LOC changing this system, the terms they use, etc. I would really like to know:
1) Are they going to change the vocabulary? At the 4,000 term level or the 80 term level?
2) What kind of timeline are they operating on if they will be changing the vocabulary?
3) Would they be interested in opening up the process to comments and input?
Conor
Conor Kenny
Congresspedia.org
Josh Tauberer
THOMAS gets better, there's less of a reason for people to come to
GovTrack. :)
But of course I agree with everyone so far and don't really have much to
add. Having THOMAS be more citizen-friendly by explaining what things
mean would be a good thing too.
As far as LIV, even if that was discontinued, I suspect that it would be
possible to replicate the classification of bills quite well through a
combined automated + user-tagged process, if someone were to implement it.
--
- Josh Tauberer
"Yields falsehood when preceded by its quotation! Yields
falsehood when preceded by its quotation!" Achilles to
Tortoise (in "Gödel, Escher, Bach" by Douglas Hofstadter)
Rob Pierson
Thank you to everyone for your contributions. During the meeting I had the chance to relay many of the comments that y'all raised.
We spoke a little bit about
the history of LIS and Thomas. LIS is a unit of CRS (the Congressional Research
Service, which is part of the Library of Congress (LOC)). Thomas is part of the
Office of Special Initiatives (OSI) at the LOC. Thomas used to be part of their
technology group, and was moved into OSI. I think that's a good move,
especially considering that the head of OSI is a member of the Library's Executive
Board.
The folks on this list may be interested in the attached document, which provides
a background into what LIS is planning for the future, as well as some history
of the group.
The meeting was interesting, and it was good to have a chance to learn more
about their perspective on many of the issues discussed. Their rationale for
having a less featured search system for Thomas is that they are trying to
appeal to a different audience. They've put a significant amount of time into
identifying their constituencies and the needs of each, and have conducted
extensive usability studies with these audiences. I'm not convinced, however,
that limiting the search capabilities of Thomas is the right approach, and that
concern was very clearly relayed to their team.
Thomas and LIS are both working on upgrading their systems and the Thomas folks
are working extensively with the LIS folks and are incorporating elements of
LIS into Thomas. I am hopeful that the next version of Thomas will incorporate
more advanced search capabilities and an improved UI.
One concerning revelation from the meeting was their expectation that the new XML bill summary database would probably be available through GPO and might not be freely available to the public. The XML version of bills and roll call votes is currently available to the public for free, and it would be a very problematic break with that precedent if GPO began selling legislative XML data. This isn't yet set in stone, however.
They're still working on the RSS feeds, and an API isn't currently in their plans. Having provided them with a clear list of the features that the community is interested in will be helpful for them in their plans for upcoming versions.
The Legislative Indexing Vocabulary is in the process of being revised at the moment. They're looking to update the terms, as well as reduce the amount at both the high and low level. They are planning on having this done within a year or so, and are interested in opening up the process to comments and input at a later point.
Josh - I'm not too worried about systems like Govtrack becoming obsolete. Regardless of how extensively Thomas is improved, websites like Govtrack will always be necessary to continue extending the frontiers of legislative information with innovative mashups and the creation of new systems for enhanced civic participation.
Ensuring no-cost access to the XML version of bill summaries could act as a catalyst in the development of these new tools. I'm going to keep investigating this and will report back once I find out more.
- RobRob Pierson
LIS intends on developing web services which will allow the repurposing of bill summary information. It is unclear in what form those web services will be available ( i.e. RSS feeds, XML files, or an eventual API). In the next 6-12 months LIS will be developing a set of requirements of how that information will be provided.
The web services would be of exponentially greater utility to websites outside of the congressional firewall, so it would be logical that Thomas would incorporate web services as well. Since the development plan has not been created yet, no final determinations have been made about what specific role Thomas and/or GPO would play in the distribution of the XML bill summaries. I believe that input from the community will be taken into account as this process proceeds.
The folks at the LoC are definitely interested in adapting Thomas to meet community needs, and I'm going to remain in contact with staff at the LOC to ensure that upcoming versions of Thomas address the issues that we've been discussing.
Cheers,
Rob
Josh Tauberer
> LIS intends on developing web services which will allow the repurposing
> of bill summary information. It is unclear in what form those web
> services will be available ( i.e. RSS feeds, XML files, or an eventual
> API). In the next 6-12 months LIS will be developing a set of
> requirements of how that information will be provided.
That's great news. I hope it translates into something for the public
too, and something that goes beyond a feed but exposes the bill status
information in a structured way (i.e. not lumped in a <rss:description>
tag or whatever), and has some sort of index feed so it's possible to
find out what other feeds have been modified in any given time range.
It's worth saying, though, that LIS/THOMAS doesn't have to do anything
technically advanced to make something that's of immense value to the
public along these lines --- a simple directory of static XML files of
the data (plus some way to identify which files have been updated) would
be immediately helpful. It doesn't matter what the schema is, or whether
it uses XML namespaces, XIncludes, or whatever --- as long as the data
is in there, it will be immediately helpful.
Thanks for pursuing this, Rob.
Conor Kenny
Conor
Conor Kenny
Congresspedia.org