Announcing Fech 1.0 by Derek Willis.
From the post:
Fech now retrieves a whole lot more campaign finance data.
We’re excited to announce the 1.0 release of Fech, our Ruby library for parsing Federal Election Commission electronic campaign filings. Fech 1.0 now covers all of the current form types that candidates and committees submit. Originally developed to parse presidential committee filings, Fech now can be used for almost any kind of report (Senate candidates file on paper, so Fech can’t help there). The updated documentation, made with Github Pages, has a full listing of the supported formats.
Now it’s possible to use Fech to parse the pre-election filings of candidates receiving contributions of $1,000 or more — one way to see the late money in politics — or to dig through political party and political action committee reports to see how committees spend their funds. At The Times, Fech now plays a much greater role in powering our Campaign Finance API and in interactives that make use of F.E.C. data.
The additions to Fech include the ability to compare two filings and examine the differences between them. Since the F.E.C. requires that amendments replace the entire original filing, the comparison feature is especially useful for seeing what has changed between an original filing and an amendment to it. Another feature allows users to pass in a specific quote character (or parse a filing’s data without one at all) in order to avoid errors parsing comma-separated values that occasionally appear in filings.
Kudos to the New York Times for development of software and Fech in particular, to give the average person access to “public” information. Without meaningful access, it can hardly qualify as “public” can it?
Something the U.S. Senate should keep in mind as it remains mired in 19th century pomp and privilege. Or diplomats. The other remaining class of privilege. Transparency is coming.
Update: Fech 1.1 Released.