WashingtonLeg

About

This ruby .gem is developed to interface with Washington Legislature's Web Services at http://wslwebservices.leg.wa.gov.

WA Leg has an API, written in .NET, that delivers XML for the Data Objects described below.

Our initial use case for this is to pull data from WA Leg service and push it into CivicIdeas for public commenting through eComment.

Data Objects

http://wslwebservices.leg.wa.gov/#_Executive_Summary

Service Name | Description Amendments | Bill being amended, chamber in which amendment was offered, amendment type, floor number, sponsor, etc. Committees | Chamber, name of committee, committee acronym. Committee actions | Committee actions. Committee meetings | Date, time, and location of committee meetings and the bills scheduled to be heard. Documents | Document name, type (bill, amendment, bill report, etc.), document name translated into English, the URLs of the HTML and PDF versions of the document. Legislation | Bill number, current status, bill history, sponsors. RCW cite affected | Which sections of the RCW a bill affects. Session law | The session law number of any bill passed by the Legislature, its effective date, veto information, etc. Sponsors | Chamber, name of sponsor, sponsor acronym.

Installation

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'washingtonleg'

And then execute:

$ bundle install

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install washingtonleg

Usages

from IRB: load '/path/to/lib/washingtonleg.rb' s = Washingtonleg::Base.new Washingtonleg::Base.new(:debug => true) # to write files out to /tmp s.get_legislation_by_year(2012) => array of all bill items for 2012

Each bill is a hash that looks something like:

bill = {
  :biennium => "2011-12",
  :bill_id => "SI 502",
  :bill_number => "502",
  :subsitute_version => "0",
  :engrossed_version => "0",
  :short_legislation_type => "I",
  :original_agency => "Senate",
  :active => "true"
}

Step 3 - Final

1. Load all 2011-12 Bills
2. from the local WA Leg files
3. into CivicIdeas
4. as AgendaItems
5. TODO: rake maintenance:waleg_import

Data Notes

• 4279 bills for the 2012-13 Session

Contributing

1. Fork it
2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
3. Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Added some feature')
4. Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
5. Create new Pull Request