I’ve been waiting for quite some time to see Open Congress in action, so it was a little frustrating that various commitments mean it’s taken a few days to really explore it.

The site gets much of its data from govtrack.us, but provides a more intuitive interface. The index of what’s going on in the US Congress can be explored in a variety of ways, going through bills, senators, representatives, committees, industries, and issues. The senator and representative navigation works pretty well, and its nice to have a feed for each one, but it would also be good to be able to navigate using a map or other visual device rather than having to switch to the state view and then scroll down to find the representative I’m interested in.

There’s integration with technorati to pick up blog chatter around given bills, and a ‘contact all sponsors’ feature is on its way which could be a nice feature for those looking to take action on specific bills.

Categorization by issue was always going to be the hardest thing to cover. According to the site:

These issue areas were created and assigned by the Congressional Research Service, a government agency created by Congress to provide non-partisan research. With over 4,000 issue areas to browse here on OpenCongress, there are lots of ways to connect a general issue you care about to a specific bill in Congress.

Which does help with navigation, but it would be good if there were more ways for those using the site to contribute to that categorisation and I tend to agree with Jon Lebkowsky when he says (in a review of BillHop) that:

I think we need an AI engine for analyzing legislation, facilitating that zeroing in on issues I mentioned above, and it would be great to see a budget simulator on the site

Beyond that, what I’d really love to see someone put together is a US politics site that shows how issues move up and down through the levels of government and how they move across its different branches. Few issues are ever fully addressed by just the federal government and for concerned citizens (or even just residents, like me) to be able to see where the issues they care about lie in a holistic way would be very powerful.

Maybe if enough government-related sites use open data and clean APIs we’ll eventually see that become an easy mashup to produce? In the meantime, Open Congress is a very nice addition to the range of open government web applications available in the US.

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The Rapid, the bus service for Grand Rapids and surrounding areas, recently redesigned their website. The redesign was long overdue and the result certainly looks a lot cleaner, if still far from inspiring. They’ve added a flash-based map showing their routes (though it could do with being a little larger on the page) and added PDF maps of each route (eg. this one for Route 6). Unfortunately as yet there’s no tool for working out routes, but that’s not a big surprise.

My favourite features, however, are not any of those mentioned above but the fact that each route now has a clean URL (eg. http://www.ridetherapid.org/ride/routes/6/) and a link to google maps for each stop, thereby exposing the coordinates of all the stops. With those two components in place, it becomes very easy to pull out the route data and begin to apply it to other uses. A ruby script (using _why’s excellent hpricot) to do just that would be:

#!/usr/bin/env ruby
require 'rubygems'
require 'open-uri'
require 'hpricot'
 
routes = (1..15).to_a.concat [24,28,37,44,49,50,51]
 
routes.each do |route|
  begin
    route_uri = "http://www.ridetherapid.org/ride/routes/#{route}/stops/"
    doc = Hpricot(open(route_uri))
    title = doc.at("h1").children[0].to_s.strip
    puts title
    stopList = doc.search("div#stopList table tr")
    (1..stopList.size).each do |row|
      unless stopList[row].nil?
        uri = stopList[row].at("a").attributes['href']
        name = stopList[row].at("a").children[0].to_s
        coords = uri.match(/q=(\d+\.\d+),\+(.*?)\&/)
        if coords.class == MatchData
          latitude = coords[1]
          longitude = coords[2]
          puts "#{name} on route #{route} is at #{latitude}, #{longitude}"
        end
      end
    end
  rescue => err
    puts "Problem retrieving #{route_uri}"
  end
end

With this data available, it immediately becomes possible for local people and organizations to make use of it in a variety of ways–businesses could easily show the nearest bus stops to their locations, listing services can help visitors plan their routes, and those of us who aren’t fans of the flash-map could use other services to build alternatives.

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For some time now I’ve been interested in the possibility of bringing together political information from all different layers of government and finding ways of layering it. Too few of us understand where the key decisions on the issues that concern or affect us are taken. Action at a local level can be a very powerful political tool it’s hard to find out which level is most appropriate, or to trace how issues move between layers. Unfortunately it can seem even harder to find well-structured data at more local levels than it is on a national level.

That’s why I was very interested to discover Civic Footprint, a project of the Center for Neighborhood Technology that provides a simple web interface (and since May 2006 an API) for residents of Cook County, Illinois to find out the ‘political geography’ of their address.

For users of the website those districts are matched up with representatives, so you can quickly find out who represents you on each level, and from there jump off to that representative’s website or wikipedia entry, or a Google News or Technorati search for them. It’d be nice if the congressional pages (such as this for Danny Davis (D)) were integrated with a site like govtrack for more targetted information that google or technorati can provide, but it’s still a great source of information.

It doesn’t look like the API will yet tell you who the representatives are for each of your districts, simply providing the IDs of those districts. Hopefully it will soon. It’ll be very interesting to see how the site develops, as it shows potential to become something of an example of how civic and political data can be made accessible and how services can be built on top of that.

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