GovTrack has done some awesome work generating publicly available machine readable data for US government information. After the last election I decided that I really wanted to get involved in some sort of volunteer technology/political activity, so I started googling and found GovTrack pretty much just starting up. Now there is a loose affiliation of similar sites (including GovTrack) called Ogdex who are attempting to foster the collection of publicly available government information. In particular there has been some talk on the govtrack discussion list about local efforts to add state data to the collection of federal data…and even bounties for getting state data collection going. I’m going to take a stab at writing some scraping utilities for gathering together Illinois data and will report back with how it goes. If you are interested in helping out details are available.

Update: Joshua just set up a new drupal site for govtrack development.