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Welcome to the wiki for the Georgia Legislative API. The purpose of this application is to expose programatic access to the activities of the Georgia General Assembly to enable projects in the same vein of OpenCongress to get access to data about the activities of the General Assembly. This wiki documents the API and usage for this application.

The Georgia General Assembly currently publishes information about their activities in a human-only format. There's no way to get structured JSON/XML from them about what they've been doing. So I decided to build a way to turn the human-only format into something application can use.

This application is still under development. But eventually, I plan to provide the use of this API as a hosted service for anyone who wants to use it, and collect a modest monthly fee to cover the hosting expenses for those who plan to use it to build an OpenGovernment type site. The fee is designed to cover the expenses of running the application in the cloud, and the engineering effort to maintain its infrastructure (which will include some things like a Jenkins instance with a job to catch things like the General Assembly changing the HTML structure of their pages).

Of course, this is Open Source, so if you'd prefer to be responsible for maintaining those items on your own, you're more than welcome to.

What could someone do with this?

If you're not technical, it may not be immediately obvious what this project will gain you. In short, it's intended to be a stepping stone to much larger, better things. For example, with something like this in place you could build:

• A website like OpenCongress that enables users to follow certain legislation and representatives, comments on what they think about it, etc.
• A system that automatically detects when an individual votes for/against something that doesn't match up with what their published stance is.
• Applications to compute how frequently members vote with/against the party, and on what kinds of issues.

The ceiling is the limit when it comes to the amount of enrichment a service like this could provide in the areas of research and citizen engagement.