[n2d4]

I wish there were more beautiful government data aggregators like this one — most people don't even know how much stuff the gov makes publicly accessible (voluntarily or by means of FOIA), probably because it's all buried in 20-year-old Java applets.

What similar resources are out there? Any favorites?

[Terr_]

Washington DC's laws are in git.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/11/how-i-changed-th...

[KennyBlanken]

Github, not "git."

They don't appear to publish the XML formats they're using.

There's no description of their fees/pricing.

None of the software is open-source. There's barely any details about how the software even works.

It's about as opaque as they seem to feel they can get away with. "Email us for pricing" is not how a service like that should work.

[Terr_]

> Github, not "git."

No, I stand by my original phrasing: The important part here is that legislative changes are being recorded and shown through a version control system (i.e. git) not the fact that one of the repos is publicly visible via one of several possible web-GUI services.

It would still be somewhat laudable even if the usage was: "Here's the repo, clone it yourself an poke around with desktop tools." In contrast, the opposite mix of "here's a website that shows diffs but you can't have the underlying data" would suck.

> They don't appear to publish the XML formats they're using.

I see XSD files...? Plus, this original design doc is probably still relevant. [0]

[0] https://github.com/DCCouncil/dc-code-prototype?tab=readme-ov...

[joshdata]

Hi. Author of that article here, and I worked with the DC Council to get the initial prototype going, if anyone has any questions.

What's important in the story is that the law went from being not open to open and the law-publication-process was modernized internally. The fact that it ended up on GitHub was the least important, but most fun, outcome.

GitHub adds nothing of any value for the transparency and accountability of the lawmaking process (I mean, what lawmakers do), but it is a great platform for publishing structured data files for the law to create open access.

[neuronexmachina]

Direct link to the repo for DC's laws: https://github.com/DCCouncil/law-xml

[jbaber]

This is wonderful.

[CivBase]

More of this please.

[mxschll]

I would also like to know. The German government actually has a decent API for accessing countless parliamentary documents, but it doesn't make the data very accessible to normal people...