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Future of Open States

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Open States Summit 2021

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Quick History

  • 2009-2011: “50 States Project”
  • 2011-2016: Sunlight Era
  • 2017-2020: Independent Era
  • now: Civic Eagle Era

Roadmaps:

2021: https://blog.openstates.org/december-2020/

2020: https://blog.openstates.org/2020-roadmap/

2019: https://blog.openstates.org/more-ways-to-get-state-legislative-data-d9aece2245f0/

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2021 Roadmap In Review

  • Timeliness (>1/day scrapes)
    • ~4x increase in scrapes per day
  • People Data Refresh (github.com/openstates/people)
  • New Data Sets
    • Federal Data!! (bills, committees, people)
    • Committees in 24 states
    • Events
  • Data Quality Dashboards

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Other 2021 Improvements

Federal data in Find Your Legislators tool:

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Other 2021 Improvements

New scraping framework for People & Committees:

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Other 2021 Improvements

  • Enhancement Proposals
  • Community Slack
  • Farewell API v1 (10 years!)
  • API v3 improvements:
    • more metadata (latest runs, download links)
    • new endpoints for new data types
    • Person.offices schema improvements
  • And as always, tons of scraper enhancements & fixes!
    • 675 scraper commits from 13 contributors

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2022 Data Priorities

  • 2022 session updates
    • Preparation, ongoing maintenance
    • Full-time Civic Eagle engineers working on OS Data
  • Reprocessing
    • Ability to make and apply fixes without needing a full re-scrape
  • Expanding new data sets
    • 10-20 states at a time
    • Committees
    • Events
    • News/Media
  • Existing data refresh
    • Votes
    • Bill Subjects
    • Municipal data

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2022 Reach Goals

  • Use of ML to highlight key insights
    • Bill topic taxonomy
    • Expansion of COVID-19 lists
  • Expanding to new datasets
    • Exploring Regulations + Rulemaking processes

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2022 OpenStates.org Enhancements

  • Return of Committee Data on OpenStates.org
  • Event Data on OpenStates.org
  • Give OS community more ownership over OpenStates.org
    • working to make local development easier
    • document path to add features
  • Goal: more community contributions!

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2022 Community Goals

  • More public involvement in OpenStates.org & related projects
  • Improved Documentation & Contributor Guide
    • WIP, new docs.openstates.org is live now
  • Make Open States Summit Annual Event

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Thank You!!!

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Up Next: User Highlights at 2pm