Instead of joking about it, you might find it interesting to actually go browse the available methods, as well as some of the examples. (Link to the examples page: http://www.gop.gov/aboutapi/documentation) Take an honest look at, say, the Perl example. Then browse a few of the methods (on the right hand side) to see what they return.
Although I don't find myself agreeing with the GOP on many issues, I am able to see that this offers real value beyond fodder for programmers who wish to be comedians. If nothing else, I hope to see it driving the momentum to 'open' government.
(It is mostly correct, but they have a semicolon incorrectly placed between arguments to the LWP request function. I usually test my code before putting it online. Usually.)
You can keep tabs on what half the government is doing.
And there are honest-to-god Republican activists out there (check the comments with negative ratings on the bottom of social news sites) who want to know what their party is up to and keep it on task. Much like how others might want to know what the Obama administration or the Democratic caucus is up to.
All in all, I think it's pretty awesome. I hope the Democrats will follow suit, or that Congress will put up a general API. That would be even better.
I understand that many/most are partisan and may only want to keep tabs on "their guys". But the idea of the U.S. gov paying for _any_ partisan site such as this is terrible. I find it hard to understand how its even legal.
Our gov is based on electing people, not parties. I can see how subsidizing individual campaigns can be allowed. Subsidizing parties is contrived from little to no constitutional basis.
The gov subsidizes parties. Campaign subsidies are given only to nominees of major and minor political parties, and party conventions are subsidized directly. From my previous link:
"The Presidential nominee of each major party may become eligible for a public grant..."
"The amount of public funding to which a minor party candidate is entitled is based on the ratio of the party's popular vote in the preceding Presidential election..."
"Each major political party is entitled to $4 million (plus cost-of-living adjustments)8 to finance its national Presidential nominating convention. A qualified minor party may become eligible for partial convention funding..."
As for the constitutional basis, I agree that there is none. Then again, there is little to no constitutional basis for social security, medicare, the war on drug users, the department of education, etc.
I'm just saying that gop.gov isn't anything special or unprecedented.
You can keep tabs on what half the government claims they are doing. Without another, independent source, preferably also with an API, verification will be hard to do.
You obviously didn't look at the API. It's just factual information (comittees, voting history, etc.) about Republican congress members. Failing technical errors, that will be accurate.
I'm anything but a Republican, but I hate when there's a seriously cool effort made by the Republicans that everyone here immediately jumps into a negative tone and tries to find things wrong with it. That's even pettier than the stuff about trying to read policy into a robots.txt file. I'd love to see the parties battling each other out on information openness.
I did look at the API. And government generated "factual information" still should be verified -- thankfully this information is verifiable (in the scientific sense). My observation was not about any party in particular, it was an observation about politics in general. Really, a party of a single branch of government providing its own status and historical information would seem to be less (however slightly) trustworthy than if the Library of Congress provided an API to the data they already collect, or if the Executive branch provided a check on the other branches through providing a service to the people like this.
I mean, election recounts seem to have more cross party and cross branch involvement and checks than the day to day operations of the government.
It is part of the civic duty of every citizen to question the motives and actions of their government, no matter which party is involved.
Out of curiosity, how do you become a "confirmed" liberal Democrat? Is that like becoming a confirmed Catholic? Is there a process?
And you are right that the most successful interest groups are ones that can get their policies pushed by both parties. I would love to see intelligent technology policies pushed by 2 parties, instead of about 10% of a party like we see now.
This method provides all Republican members of standing or subcommittees.
I recognize that this is a party site, but I wonder how much additional work it would have been to capture the non-GOP members and votes. I can't think of a situation where I'd want to know just a fraction of the members of a subcommittee; I'd think if you care you'd care about everyone in it.
This might actually be more useful in the long run. To me this says that Republicans are trying to show their tech saavy and trying to capture some of the good karma that the Democrats have doned of late in their gestures towards technology and open information.
Having the parties competing on this would be wonderful. It'd be like market effects on the web-ization of government information. Were this just a single political initiative coming from whatever agency it'd be a surefire bitrot target, but if the Republicans and Democrats start trying to one-up each other for political ends, we might see things evolve in a more interesting direction.
Politics seems to be most effective when it's trying to win something. ;-)
Seems like a direct response to the Obama election team and administration's use of the Internet and technology over recent months. In the short-term it's not going to win them any votes, but it's good for the GOP brand and setting up infrastructure and increasing awareness for later higher-profile campaigns in an area where the Democrats are seen to dominate them.
It's amazing how much competition stimulates progress.
I'm not sure the implication was necessarily that it was wrong, the poster (no pun intended) could have meant that it could simply have been better to use GET.
That's right: I wasn't implying it's wrong to use POST, merely that GET is clearer, since using it would make it more obvious that the query isn't changing the state of the server.
govtrack is amazing, rsync mirrors of their full database for your own use. A wonderfully useful website, I've even got rss feeds for what my congresspeople are up to.
I'm sure I speak for most of the progressives on HN when I say that we support what you're saying as being the overall GOP agenda, but man... that was just lame.
Thanks for the tip. I was completely unaware of that when I wrote my original post.
That's why I posted a long political diatribe, rather than a short snarky emulation of people who use a post like this as an excuse to launch into long irrelevant political diatribes.
I think the point of the negative votes was to try to get the point across that sarcasm, snarkiness, whatever, adds nothing to the conversation. A better tactic would be to add a negative vote, or simply post something thoughtful that adds to the conversation that began with the posted link, or both, or nothing at all. In my opinion, those are all more worthwhile options than adding to the meaningless comments.
I think we all detected your sarcasm, but who in particular are you responding too? I haven't seen any diatribes yet, and I think that it would be best that any reactions or responses to them should be actual replies.
I think we all detected your sarcasm, but who in particular are you responding too?
Scroll down? There are several people who made politically motivated comments. That said, perhaps the fact that they were all downvoted into oblivion is response enough.
Although I don't find myself agreeing with the GOP on many issues, I am able to see that this offers real value beyond fodder for programmers who wish to be comedians. If nothing else, I hope to see it driving the momentum to 'open' government.