Huh. I have to admit that I’d never had much of an interest in Richmond Sunlight until now, but I became curious when you showed the overarching xml tag cloud for the upcoming session as it describes the prefiled bills. Now that I can quickly see how an individual legislator contributed to or conformed with that cloud, it’s kind of nifty.

I also finished reading Del. Albo’s bills since I stopped by. If you ever needed proof that it’s more important to be a good electioneer than it is to be a good legislator if you want to get ahead in politics….

Posted by Sam on 28 December 02007 @ 3pm

How about basic demographic information? e.g. age, gender, occupation.

Posted by David on 29 December 02007 @ 12pm

Well, sure I can do that. It hadn’t occurred to me that might be useful to anybody, but it’s so easy to add, I can’t see any reason why not to do that. :)

Posted by Waldo Jaquith on 29 December 02007 @ 1pm

Thank you.

How about a house-members.xml and senate-members.xml that lists the members and gives a reference to their individual legislator xml file?

:-)

Thanks

Posted by David on 1 January 02008 @ 2pm

Absolutely, yes. Next I’m going to create XML files for every bill, but after that will come OPML files for bills by year and legislators by chamber. Then vote data as XML (by bill or legislator) and, at that point, nearly all of Richmond Sunlight’s data will be entirely portable and freely reproducible.

I intend to take such additions slowly, since they’re all academic at this point — nobody’s using them for anything yet. :)

Posted by Waldo Jaquith on 1 January 02008 @ 2pm

Is there XML available for topical/keyword searches? I’m working on turning the Politics section at RVANews (http://rvanews.com/sections/politics/) into a useful resource (instead of basically an archive page).

I can see me wanting to pull all bills having to do with “Richmond” or “Stupid Downtown ABC laws.” I’m sure there is *something* I could use that for.

Posted by Ross on 6 January 02008 @ 11pm

No XML, but there is RSS. You could get a feed of all bills tagged “Richmond” at this URL.

Posted by Waldo Jaquith on 7 January 02008 @ 7am

I’d love love love to see a query string style API that returns XML. Sort of like how Google Charts works.

But regardless, this is awesome. Good work.

Posted by Ross on 7 January 02008 @ 8am

I’d like to see that, too. :) But I’m afraid that’s pretty low on the priority list. That’s something I’d do if there were already people using the existing XML. But what with the zero people taking advantage of it right now, it’s tough to justify. :)

Posted by Waldo Jaquith on 7 January 02008 @ 1pm