Now, regarding municipal legislative data, many municipalities use a tool called Legistar which is a bit of pain for regular users – bad layouts, unintuitive search, many clicks to view the matters, links in PDFs – but lucky for us there's an API for read access. https://www.documenters.org out of Chicago has been scraping it and crowd-sourcing meeting coverage – pretty awesome to see, though I'm concerned about how they are managing their infrastructure tbh. A repo per city seems like it'll be a pain to manage.
So I've been working on a tool for browsing recent agenda and matters that makes it much easier to keep tabs on what's happening at council. I'm making weekly updates – not sure where it will lead but we've got 17 cities on it so far... https://www.legigram.com and if you have an in at the SF or Phila city clerk's office, please reach out to me. No donations so far but some very happy users. TBD whether there will be paid product on top of the free view or we will win any grant support.
From what I've learned, the SaaS ecosystem for municipalities is screwy. There's the lock-in, absurd upcharges, widening attack surfaces, stakeholder decay, etc – and now private equity entities like Vista Equity seem to be milking our cities without much of a fight. And it just feels a bit rich that their CEO in particular has been written up for some pretty intense tax fraud. https://www.wsj.com/articles/vistas-robert-smith-had-bigger-...
I saw a comment here about transparency enabling lobbyists over citizens, and I have given some thought to that concern recently as I have been building Legigram.
Maybe part of the challenge is that people outside of professional politics tend to be idealists – the better ideas are what should matter and I have them – whereas those in politics hew to a more realist perspective – that government is a matter of compromise between vested groups - whether lobbyists, donors, voting blocks, or interest groups - brokered by individual politicians and media. Meanwhile, scandal, crime, pandering, gross simplification, and heroicism make for better headlines, soundbites, and news segments – but we need to support budget balancing, zoning compromise, and school board recommendations, too.
There's certainly lots of room for skepticism around civic tech efforts generally – not to mention about how more engagement with politics should de facto lead to better outcomes. One would hope that the last few years would be proof enough to put that idea to bed. Consider further that the majority of FOIA requests are by gov't contractors seeking competitor research.
But if we can set our design goals past mere transparency, then we might see actually start to see better engagement and more agreeable outcomes. What sort of engagement might lead to better outcomes?
When civic duty, like trade work and social work, has been so devalued relative to financialization, tech, real estate – that makes it less and less rational to engage in until the problems are truly acute. But we are getting there: besides income inequality, the widening housing crisis, climate change, and the demographic shift, we need to keep the power on California, the water clean in Jackson, and the schools safe and effective in Texas – and that means in part supporting the people keeping the lights on when the mob with pitchforks show up – while also pushing towards progress.
I recently learned about Richard S. Childs, a widely forgotten 20th century reformer who successfully advocated for the council-manager municipal government format (aka the "weak" mayor format) and also helped usher in the "short ballot" based on the thinking that most people couldn't be bothered to make an informed decision about so many obscure administrative offices.
Along those lines, I think we can achieve better civic engagement by encouraging better decisions and more informed discourse. And while that doesn't just mean better end user dashboards, if I can make it so that literally millions of people can keep tabs on their city hall agenda because it'll take a minute a week instead of half an hour, that's a win enough for me.
https://govtrack.us – mentioned there – is an amazing resource for federal legislative data and continues to evolve.
There are a number of sites for tracking donations if you are concerned about money and politics. https://www.opensecrets.org is the one I check the most often – but I find that the journalists tend to make it more sensible. e.g. https://www.exposedbycmd.org/2022/08/15/kyrsten-sinema-has-m...
https://www.ballotpedia.org has great election related information as well as a bit of analysis around state trifectas in particular.
Likewise https://openstates.org/ has a ton of well indexed state legislative data as mentioned in a separate comment.
And after years of effort by the Free Law Project https://free.law/ big changes are a foot with PACER for legal dockets: https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/fed-judiciary-says-...
As for the Federal Register, where the federal executive rules live, they have a decent site: https://www.federalregister.gov/ an API https://www.federalregister.gov/developers/documentation/api... and someone made this handy quick view as well https://ofr.report/
Now, regarding municipal legislative data, many municipalities use a tool called Legistar which is a bit of pain for regular users – bad layouts, unintuitive search, many clicks to view the matters, links in PDFs – but lucky for us there's an API for read access. https://www.documenters.org out of Chicago has been scraping it and crowd-sourcing meeting coverage – pretty awesome to see, though I'm concerned about how they are managing their infrastructure tbh. A repo per city seems like it'll be a pain to manage.
So I've been working on a tool for browsing recent agenda and matters that makes it much easier to keep tabs on what's happening at council. I'm making weekly updates – not sure where it will lead but we've got 17 cities on it so far... https://www.legigram.com and if you have an in at the SF or Phila city clerk's office, please reach out to me. No donations so far but some very happy users. TBD whether there will be paid product on top of the free view or we will win any grant support.
From what I've learned, the SaaS ecosystem for municipalities is screwy. There's the lock-in, absurd upcharges, widening attack surfaces, stakeholder decay, etc – and now private equity entities like Vista Equity seem to be milking our cities without much of a fight. And it just feels a bit rich that their CEO in particular has been written up for some pretty intense tax fraud. https://www.wsj.com/articles/vistas-robert-smith-had-bigger-...
I saw a comment here about transparency enabling lobbyists over citizens, and I have given some thought to that concern recently as I have been building Legigram.
Maybe part of the challenge is that people outside of professional politics tend to be idealists – the better ideas are what should matter and I have them – whereas those in politics hew to a more realist perspective – that government is a matter of compromise between vested groups - whether lobbyists, donors, voting blocks, or interest groups - brokered by individual politicians and media. Meanwhile, scandal, crime, pandering, gross simplification, and heroicism make for better headlines, soundbites, and news segments – but we need to support budget balancing, zoning compromise, and school board recommendations, too.
There's certainly lots of room for skepticism around civic tech efforts generally – not to mention about how more engagement with politics should de facto lead to better outcomes. One would hope that the last few years would be proof enough to put that idea to bed. Consider further that the majority of FOIA requests are by gov't contractors seeking competitor research.
But if we can set our design goals past mere transparency, then we might see actually start to see better engagement and more agreeable outcomes. What sort of engagement might lead to better outcomes?
When civic duty, like trade work and social work, has been so devalued relative to financialization, tech, real estate – that makes it less and less rational to engage in until the problems are truly acute. But we are getting there: besides income inequality, the widening housing crisis, climate change, and the demographic shift, we need to keep the power on California, the water clean in Jackson, and the schools safe and effective in Texas – and that means in part supporting the people keeping the lights on when the mob with pitchforks show up – while also pushing towards progress.
I recently learned about Richard S. Childs, a widely forgotten 20th century reformer who successfully advocated for the council-manager municipal government format (aka the "weak" mayor format) and also helped usher in the "short ballot" based on the thinking that most people couldn't be bothered to make an informed decision about so many obscure administrative offices.
Along those lines, I think we can achieve better civic engagement by encouraging better decisions and more informed discourse. And while that doesn't just mean better end user dashboards, if I can make it so that literally millions of people can keep tabs on their city hall agenda because it'll take a minute a week instead of half an hour, that's a win enough for me.