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A Modest Proposal for State Legislatures
There has been some excitement in the web development community among people who work with government data. A recent bill before Congress, HR1105, contains a proposal to make bills and other legislative information more accessible online, something that would enhance the public’s ability to stay better informed about what’s going on in Congress, and also help web developers and companies provide innovative and useful tools for accessing that information.
While Congress does a fair job now, more work is needed if the federal government can claim it provides true transparency where public information is concerned.
At the state level, however, there’s even more work to be done. I don’t want to single any states out…but I could. State bills and other legislation are often difficult, at best, to find online. While all states provide some level of access, the quality ranges from pretty darn good to dreadful in terms of the bill information offered and how it is accessed. In this day of inexpensive web resources and tried and tested software, there’s simply no good excuse for providing anything less than a decent level of access and a smooth, positive user experience.
In light of that, I’ve put together a few suggestions (by no means the final word!) that state legislative bodies and state government technical operations people should consider. The demand for this sort of thing is only going to get stronger as time goes on:
1. Structured Data
Basic bill index data (bill number, date of introduction, sponsor, title, etc.) should be provided in a structured format. If all states provided this simply in plain XML, that in and of itself would be a major step forward since the bill information could be easily and readily used and shared by all parties involved (state governments, private citizens, web and software developers). Public data is only useful if it’s available in a structured format that can be shared; one could also argue that the government has an obligation to do as much as possible to reduce obstacles in this area.
2. Better Online Access
In many cases, states just need better websites for their citizens to use in accessing this information. The quality of the interfaces — i.e., the web pages and forms used to search and browse for bill information — ranges, again, from the pretty good to the confusing and unusable. There may have been a time when the cost of providing a well-designed and usable website was cost-prohibitive. Today that’s just not the case.
3. Subject Keywords and Tagging
The Congressional Research Service (CRS) does this for Congressional legislation. Some states attach keywords or subject terms to bills while others do not. Adapting some kind of standard for classifying and tagging legislation at the state level would greatly enhance the ability of citizens to locate bills of particular relevance to them. Bill numbers and, often, the actual titles of the bills themselves are less than helpful at best. “HB123” doesn’t mean much unless you already know what it means. Titles like, “A proposal to delay penalties on extant revenue for certain small businesses, for one fiscal year” isn’t much of an improvement. However, tags or subjects like “Income Tax”, “Business Tax”, “Estate Tax” help everyone get a little closer to what they’re searching for.
Implementing the above at the state levels will help all of us locate, share, and access the information contained in the bills that can, as we are witnessing at present, have so serious an effect on our lives. Of course, having read the text of many state and Congressional bills, we’re still pretty much on our own when deciphering exactly what those bills mean. Web software can only do so much :)
But it would be a step in the right direction.
