This is going to be a short post because I'm currently working on building a legislative tracker for South Carolina that will help people track pieces of legislation in the SC General Assembly. You can already access one component of the tool that I think will be pretty vital for people curious about the legislative process in the future: the committee meeting tracker.
I have been paying attention to SC's political process a little more than usual lately and I noticed that the agendas of previous committee meetings were completely inaccessible through normal browsing of the legislature's website. I had already done some inspection of the network requests from the legislature's mobile app and found an application programming interface (API) at https://rest.scstatehouse.gov. Finding this made the idea of building a legislative tracker practical for me because instead of having to scrape through pages and pages of legislative info, member bios, calendars, etc., I could just query the API and get the data back in a format that's extremely easy to work with! One of the endpoints in the API actually returns all the calendar events for the selected year. That's super useful because now I can provide you with a table with all of that info in the API. This is still an extremely early version and you'll probably notice the video links for the meetings in the future don't work yet. I'm working on a version that will hide that link for meetings that don't have a published video yet.
Being able to associate a committee meeting that has already occurred with a bill is super useful and something that I've found myself wanting to do but couldn't until I built this because they don't keep the calendar event information on the part of the site that users typically interact with!
You may be familiar with Legiscan, and while it's a great resource, it doesn't actually track these committee meetings and that's pretty important, at least it is to me, since most of the bills in the legislature never even make it out of committee.
Anyway, that's all for now, but I'll do a post in the future detailing how the API works and what all the legislative tracking site can do, but first I've gotta finish building it!
Here's some things that I've read or listened to this week that I found interesting:
Sayash Kapoor
