CodeSushi

I combined a couple projects I've been working on, added some features, bought a domain and created GovRake.com.

This site indexes 8+ years of Maine state legislative records from the 119th congress to the 123rd (this session). Each day's session has a detail page with all the bills mentioned as well as a public comment area. GovRake keeps an updated pubic hearing schedule and links to bill details on each hearing. Bill detail pages have public comment areas and link to sessions in which they were mentioned. The front page also contains the public hearing schedule with links to the bill to be discussed and the audio stream for that hearing.

There is a wealth of data available from the state, some of it easier to get at than others. Now that I have a pretty good framework in place, it's just a matter of prying the data from the cold dead hands of the state web services which hold it hostage, and providing some modern services on top of that. My intent is to provide RSS and email updates for hearings, bills and anything else that is updated from time to time as well as a platform for community discussion and research.

This project is in ACTIVE development and there should be new features and improvements every few days.

I'd like to thank my representative, Seth Berry, for helping to fill me in on various state processes and putting up with my extreme political rants. If your government reps don't believe in transparency and accountability, like mine do... keep that in mind when November rolls around.

Leave a comment or email me ( dan-AT-codesushi-DOT-com ) with your question, comments or suggestions.

Ahh.. the things you find when you're using unknown data...

Under suspension of the rules, the presiding officer was allowed to wear a sweater. - House Record 2001-03-31

There is a big difference between making something available and making something useful... Our house and senate legislative record is a great example of this. There are hundreds of word documents holding the legislative record... current house records, historic house records, current & historic senate records. These documents hold quite a bit of interesting stuff but they are unindexed and a bit hard to find.

So I wrote some code that downloads all those docs, converts them to a couple different formats and indexes them for your searching pleasure. Here it is. This is something I've had on the back burner for a while and just dusted it off a little bit. I have a bunch of ideas for this app... hopefully I will soon be integrating this data with the public hearing data I mentioned in my previous post and a few other bits of public data to make a truly useful resource for activists, legislators, reporters and the public at large. If you have ideas that fit this theme (or not) feel free to leave a comment.