The Unitedstates Project

Speaking as someone who contributed a few scrapers to the inspectors general project (<a href="https://github.com/unitedstates/inspectors-general" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;unitedstates&#x2F;inspectors-general</a>), I think this is a great and worthwhile effort. It&#x27;s actually not that hard to contribute a scraper if you know a little Python (and maybe a way to learn a little Python if you don&#x27;t).<p>One thing that my friend who works in Open Data has told me is that it&#x27;s important for websites like this to exist, to be able to point non-technical people at them and say &quot;SEE. THIS is why you can&#x27;t just publish everything as a PDF&quot;.

Wow. If this can aggregate some of the secondary sources that are the main source of Lexus&#x2F;Westlaw&#x27;s power, it would be fantastic.

For any Malaysian readers out there, here&#x27;s our version:<p><a href="http://www.sinarproject.org/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sinarproject.org&#x2F;</a>

Although many folks from the Sunlight Foundation support the project, it has relatively decentralized control:<p>&gt; This is an unusual, and occasionally chaotic, model for an open data project. the &#x2F;unitedstates project is a neutral space; GitHub&#x27;s permissions system allows many of us to share the keys, so no one person or institution controls it. What this means is that while we all benefit from each other&#x27;s work, no one is dependent or &quot;downstream&quot; from anyone else. It&#x27;s a shared commons in the public domain.<p>From <a href="http://sunlightfoundation.com/blog/2013/08/20/a-modern-approach-to-open-data/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;sunlightfoundation.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2013&#x2F;08&#x2F;20&#x2F;a-modern-appro...</a>

Awesome list of resources! I&#x27;m currently working on a text-based Twilio app that simplifies updates on how their Senator&#x2F;Representative votes on major legislation. Further down the line I&#x27;d like to tie in direct communication with Senators&#x2F;Reps where they give a statement on why they voted the way they did, updates on when they&#x27;re in their local offices, etc.

We use the GovTrak API&#x27;s and some from Sunlight Foundation for <a href="http://PlaceAVote.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;PlaceAVote.com</a>. They are pretty awesome and well written.

The project I am most excited about is the citation extractor: <a href="https://github.com/unitedstates/citation" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;unitedstates&#x2F;citation</a>

Doesn&#x27;t www.enigma.io do this?

Excellent leadership from sinak!

This is awesome - though I&#x27;m amused that the site that clearly represents US data, is hosted on an overseas domain... (.io = British Indian Ocean Territory).<p>Edit: All snark aside though, this really is awesome. I can imagine all kinds of useful things that come out of this sort of structured data, including just interesting information (like demographic patterns of various politicians, etc).