On the importance of standards.

I’m writing code for Richmond Sunlight to track the subcommittees (not just committees) that a bill is in. The house has fourteen committees, the senate has eleven. Some of these committees have no subcommittees, while others have a bunch. Every bill’s status history, as recorded daily by the General Assembly, lists the committees and subcommittees each each bill is assigned to. Trouble is, they seem to be manually recorded, using whatever shorthand happens to pop into the person’s mind at the time that they write it down.

The senate commerce and labor committee is recorded alternately as “C&L,” “C & L,” and “Commerce and Labor.” The senate general laws and technology committee is recorded alternately as “GL,” GL&T,” and “General Laws.” Transportation is sometimes “Trans” and sometimes “Transportation.”

There are dozens of bills right now that claim to be in the senate’s “App.” committee, scattered across a half dozen subcommittees. The trouble is that the senate doesn’t have an appropriations committee — the house does. The senate has a finance committee, one that has none of the subcommittees listed for these bills. They’re all simply wrongly recorded as being currently in the senate, when they’re actually in the house.

Consequently, this code is beastly. I can account for all these variants of names and even all of these errors…until a new set of variants and errors crop up. And then a new shim has to be written to support those. I entirely appreciate that the General Assembly has long had the privilege of isolation. They could recorded something as being in the “CC & T” committee and the kind of people who knew how to get to that information were the kind of people who know that stands for “Counties, Cities and Towns.” But now they’ve opened the gates to their data, and it’s a mess. No doubt the General Assembly’s crack technical staff wince when they see this data in their system, but they can only work with what they’re given.

The public doesn’t know and shouldn’t have to know that a bill claiming to be in the senate must actually be in the house if it’s in the general government and technology subcommittee. Here’s hoping that some standardization takes place soon.