BillsViz

Inspiration

As technology modernizes our dissemination of information, awareness of laws that affect the social good are more and more in the back of the mind of Americans. Additionally, with fake news in the spotlight, new forms of understanding legislature are wanted. As a diverse group of individuals, with international backgrounds, we thought a great element of social good would be through the promotion of social engagement by following the recent history of how laws are passed and by who.

The problem

Current websites (e.g. congress.gov, gophouse.org, senate.gov) comprehensively provide details per bill. Additional technologies such as state websites (e.g. legislature.mi.gov) and current phone apps (e.g. Track Bills, Pocket Congress), also make individual bill assessment or identification of individual bill sponsors more convenient. However, while congressional hearings have always been accessible, either via website, written transcripts or even television broadcasts, it doesn’t mean it fosters social engagement or helps interested individuals learn interactively.

The Solution

With current forms of visualizing data, a more interactive form of following the history of laws and proposed bills is possible. As such, an interested individual with little or a lot of knowledge can look at comparative data and understand a little more about the effectiveness of congress, congressmen, committees, states or even party’s ability to introduce bills and pass laws. To understand more about legislature and themes within congress in a modern way, we visualize bill history with several filters that are typically present in bill comprehensive summaries. This includes the following: state, congressional session, and time (dating back to January 3rd, 1997).
Additionally, while not currently present in our submission with more time we would have incorporated more filters to better visualize these bills introduced by congress and enacted into law. This would have included looking at comparative summaries of two sides of legislature (house of representative and senates) in their production of introducing bills to their finality of being enacted. Further, we would have compared the proliferation of a specific sponsor (typically a congressman) relative to another sponsor based on congressional session, state, or even party. Similar comparisons could be made by committee and even by subject (e.g. health, finance, ect.), all our accessible through APIs.

How we built it

We gathered the data for the Congress bills from the ProPublica Data Store Congress API. The data preprocessing stage consisted of extracting from the bill endpoint to JSON files. We plotted the US map from GeoJSON data of the whole nation and the states. The visualization runs on NodeJS server and uses D3.js for creating the plots. Additionally, we used Bootstrap for the web style and the code nstslider for the double slider. We acknowledge the creators of these open source javascript libraries.

Challenges we ran into

Our first challenge included manually skimming through a sample of the dataset to fix bugs that appear from the API raw data. Secondly, our most unexpected challenge included grasping a solid understanding of how a bill is introduced and passed to better know what information was best to display. To overcome this, we learned a lot about legislature ourselves. This then helped us identify more useful filters. Due to the time constraint, the dataset we used was just subset of the whole data available. Therefore, it gives insight as to what can be achieved. In an improved version we would display the whole dataset, with accessing a database on the back end.

Accomplishments that we’re proud of

We learn a great deal about open datasets, how to get the data with the available APIs, as well as how to preprocess the data for the next step. To most of us, it is our first time to work with node.js, and we all have learned a lot within the last three days. As a group of people with different background, this has been a very exciting experience for us to learn how to develop a project from scratch that might have an impact in society.