top | item 44203406

(no title)

joshdata | 9 months ago

Hi. I run GovTrack.

OP may have been unlucky on the timing. The site isn't usually down. Here's the link to the text of H.R. 1 on GovTrack: https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/119/hr1/text

We automatically add links to U.S. Code and other citations. In this case Congress.gov is missing rich formatting which we have (I'm not sure why they are missing it for this bill, normally they have it). GovTrack also allows making diff-like comparisons between bill versions and between bills (for example, you can see the last-minute changes made ahead of the vote on this bill).

Source code is available on GitHub if anyone wants to try making GovTrack better, although it's quite complicated because Congressional information is complicated and there's no real money behind this: https://github.com/govtrack/govtrack.us-web/

If anyone has particular thoughts on what would be helpful when viewing bill text --- within the realm of the information that is actually freely available --- I am all ears.

discuss

order

skadamat|9 months ago

I would love a Genius.com / annotation layer on top of these bills too. Just a dream I'm sharing out loud for no particular reason :) love govtrack in general otherwise!

joshdata|9 months ago

Without commenting on the merits of that idea, I'll just say that I do not want to be the one who has to moderate user generated content.