Sunlight Labs continues its work for a more open government with its recent release of the Real Time Congress API.
Today we’re making available the Real Time Congress API, a service we’ve been working on for several months, and will be continuing to expand.
The Real Time Congress API (RTC) is a RESTful API over the artifacts of Congress, kept up to date in as close to real time as possible. It consists of several live feeds of data, available in JSON or XML. These feeds are filterable and sortable and sliceable in all sorts of different ways, and you can read the docs to see how.
There are seven data types the API will report:
- Bills
- Votes
- Amendments
- Videos
- Floor Updates
- Committee Hearings
- Documents
Now someone has to do something with all of this data coming in. Can you think of a useful application for what is essentially an automated government Twitter feed?
I think the problem with the API is that it apparently only works for queries. I want to control my congressman’s vote from my phone, dang it!
Next year, maybe.
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