Summary
Slides: Post CurationPlans CNS
Posts: Curation Principles Curating Politician Posts 1- Creating post content
2- Creating post content Terms of Service Privacy Policy Creative Commons
Text: Curation Toolbox Email Templates Content Curator Interns
OnAir Post: Bill Track50
Possible Partnerships
Bill Track50- Legi Nation
From Tim
Hi Tim, great to meet you. BillTrack50 provides basic bill info and keyword searching via our api, as well as basic legislator info and roll call votes. Here is our documentation so you can see what all is available: https://www.billtrack50.com/documentation/webservices/v2.0 . Your API Key is: 661bb5d2-5808-4316-9905-706f8a8b727b . One note, to access federal legislation use the state abbreviation “US”. We also let you keep notes inside your BillTrack50 attached to bills (and I supposed we could finesse attaching them to legislators too) and let you access that custom data via the API as well. But I’m thinking the raw data is going to be the most useful to you. I’m just mentioning the custom data just in case, since I don’t know what all you might be doing.
We charge $3500 for an annual subscription, but we do offer free subscriptions to students. So I’m feeling like I’d like to offer you free access to all 50 states and congress, up through the end of 2020, and then we can talk from there. Assuming you find the data feed useful, of course. onAir is a fascinating project and I’d love to be involved and support your goal of covering all 50 states. Also, GMU has been a paying subscriber to BillTrack50 almost since our founding, so I’m particularly inclined to be generous for your pilot project. Anyway, right now you are in “free trial” status. If you decide our service is going to be useful to you let me know and upgrade you to a full unlimited account.
Let me know what questions you run into and we’ll try to help.
From Todd
This sounds like a great project to associate with and looks like it could be a prime case of linking existing efforts with our own unique capabilities and perspective.
Tim, BillTrack50 offers a web-based API, which means we can write our own code in the OnAir Elections Plugin to interface with it. We just need to decide what data we want and how we want to use it, then I do some magic and we have integration. For instance, the politician post type can have a Recent Bills section that automatically pulls from BillTrack50 (caveat, we need to look at the impact on performance, though some form of caching capability may solve that problem). We will also need to figure out how to identify the BillTrack50 records (e.g. legislators, legislation, etc) and associate them with our own. What I anticipate doing is adding some API-related ID fields to the politician post type. Each API we connect to would get its own field for any post type that has a direct analog in another system: Google Civic API, BillTrack50, Open Secrets, Follow the Money, and any other we might add in the future).
