Project Ideas for GovTrack Development
If you're thinking about getting involved in the development of GovTrack or starting a new related civic project (great!!) check out some of the ideas below. Some funding may be available for you to work on these ideas. A longer but more informal list of ideas is on the wiki. And if you have ideas of your own, even better!
Earmarks
Earmarks are spending items inserted by legislators that are directed to projects in the legislator's district. Let's include some statistics about earmarks in the pages for Members of Congress: are they a big leader in earmarks or an icon of reform? Taxpayers for Common Sense and EarmarkWatch.org have done the hard work of creating a database of earmarks. We just have to tie the data into our system, generate some statistics, and add the info to the website.
Law Diffs and Patches
Bills are written in a precise legal language that describe how they update the United States Code to revise the law. But bills are like patches without any context, making it sometimes very difficult to understand their intent and ramifications. (The United States Code isn't the only aspect of law, but it's the most relevant to GovTrack. See this page.) Can we make an automated process to show a "diff" of how the U.S.C. is going to be updated by a bill? Can we put bills in context? This is going to involve some text processing.
Election Statistics
How close are the elections? The Federal Elections Commission has a few spreadsheets with elections statistics. We want to normalize these spreadsheets and integrate them with our database so we can display some statistics on GovTrack.
Historical Legislative Documents
The Library of Congress has scanned images of historical legislative documents. Can we integrate these into our system to make the most comprehensive legislative database? It might involve some image processing and scanning. See this page.
Finding Similar Legislation
Often bills are introduced in parallel forms in the House and Senate, and often when they fail to get enough support in one year they are reintroduced as new bills in later years. Can we automatically identify related bills by their content? Can simhash help?
Social Tools
Create a Facebook app for GovTrack. Let people post bills to their profile (OpenCongress has one like this), but there's a lot of untapped potential here. Let people network by congressional district (there's an app in the works about this at the time of writing and there's probably room for collaboration).
Visualization of Legislative Statistics
Create new visualizations of legislative statistics: missed votes, political leaning, how many bills legislators introduced, etc. The goal with new visualizations is to help people put the numbers in context.
Integrate Legislator Blog and Twitter Feeds
Help legislators get their message out to the GovTrack community by excerpting from their blog and twitter feeds. We'd need to collect the feed URLs first.
Integrate the Code of Federal Regulations
The Code of Federal Regulations (CFR) is an aspect of U.S. law primarily due to the work of the executive branch. Anyway, Carl Malamud, GovTrack, and others bought the raw text of the CFR from the Government Printing Office (yes, it was not free), but now we have to put it to use. Carl probably could use a hand getting the raw text into a displayable form. It's in SGML with limited documentation.
