Currently, the Georgia General Assembly is required to publish information about votes, bills, and membership on their website. The problem is their site is a hodgepodge of different amounts of failure. One of the biggest shortcomings is that it's incredibly difficult to see what a particular member has voted on. Furthermore, there's no way to get access to the data in a structured format directly from the General Assembly website.
So, I'm writing this application to enable that functionality, because who you vote for is important and knowing the incumbants you may want to vote for is important.
The app uses express for its frontend, apricot to scrape data from the General Assembly website, kue (backed by redis) to queue up and process those jobs, and mongodb as the persistent datastore for information recorded.
I don't see this project as an end unto itself, but as a stepping stone to providing open, structured access to information on what the Georgia State Government is doing. That starts with recording and standardizing the information.
I eventually plan for this to be a hosted service anyone can just query, but not yet.
The project is currently under development, so there's no public endpoint you can access
quite yet. But feel free to clone the project and set it up yourself. Use the usual
npm install -d to get the packages you need and coffee app.coffee to boot it up.
The web scraper will populate your local MongoDB automatically.
My name is Matt Farmer. I'm a code bandit currently slinging code on behalf of Elemica, Anchor Tab, the Lift Framework, and a few other small outfits who are out to make the world a better place. I tweet regularly, and blog and little bit less so.