From the webpage:
A live JSON API for the people and work of Congress, provided by the Sunlight Foundation.
Features
Lots of features and data for members of Congress:
- Look up legislators by location or by zip code.
- Official Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook accounts.
- Committees and subcommittees in Congress, including memberships and rankings.
We also provide Congress' daily work:
- All introduced bills in the House and Senate, and what occurs to them (updated daily).
- Full text search over bills, with powerful Lucene-based query syntax.
- Real time notice of votes, floor activity, and committee hearings, and when bills are scheduled for debate.
All data is served in JSON, and requires a Sunlight API key. An API key is free to register and has no usage limits.
We have an API mailing list, and can be found on Twitter at @sunlightlabs. Bugs and feature requests can be made on Github Issues.
Important not to confuse this effort with transparency.
As the late Aaron Swartz remarked in the O’Reilly “Open Government” text:
…When you create a regulatory agency, you put together a group of people whose job is to solve some problem. They’re given the power to investigate who’s breaking the law and the authority to punish them. Transparency, on the other hand, simply shifts the work from the government to the average citizen, who has neither the time nor the ability to investigate these questions in any detail, let alone do anything about it. It’s a farce: a way for Congress to look like it has done something on some pressing issue without actually endangering its corporate sponsors.
Here is an interface that:
…shifts the work from the [Sunlight Foundation] to the average citizen, who has neither the time nor the ability to investigate these questions in any detail, let alone do anything about it. It’s a farce: a way for [Sunlight Foundation] to look like it has done something on some pressing issue without actually endangering its corporate sponsors. (O’Reilly’s Open Government book [“…more equal than others” pigs]
Suggestions for ending the farce?
I first saw this at the Legal Informatics Blog, Mill: Sunlight Foundation releases Congress API.