Evaluation of Alabamas Legislative Data Accessibility Prepared by James Turk (Sunlight Foundation) with Stephen Jackson (OpenBama.

org) The purpose of this report is to evaluate the online presence of the Alabama Legislature, in particular the accessibility of legislative information (including bills, legislators, committees and votes). This evaluation is using the guidelines set out in the Preserving State Government Digital Information white paper authored by the Minnesota Historical Society in partnership with Sunlight Foundation (http://www.mnhs.org/preserve/records/legislativerecords/docs_pdfs/ BestPracticePrinciplesOpenGovtMarch2011_000.pdf). This evaluation and associated recommendations aim at making it easier for citizens and citizen developers to make better use of the legislative information offered by Alabamas ALISON system. While there is a particular focus on citizen developers being able to access the data, most of these recommendations apply to normal citizen use as well. For example, recommendations about permanent URLs and making the system work without Javascript are important for researchers wishing to provide permanent references and individuals with disabilities wishing to access the website. Special considerations that make the data easier to access for citizen developers are included in projects like http://www.openbama.org/ and http://openstates.org/. These projects help to keep the public informed about the working of the state legislature, however they rely on programmatic access to information to continue providing their services to citizens. Completeness Alabamas legislature makes its data available via a system known as ALISON (http:// alisondb.legislature.state.al.us/acas/ACASLoginMac.asp). ALISON contains all information for the past ten years. While more data is always better, ten years is a reasonable time period and perfectly in line with what is seen in other states. By careful querying of ALISON it is possible to get a full set of bills introduced in any of these sessions, and on each bill the full list of sponsors, actions, votes, etc. is present. Compared to other state offerings there are several areas identified for improvement: making committee roll call votes available, and historical legislator and committee information, and improvements to the listing of bill histories. * Committee roll call votes are currently not present in any form and assuming they are recorded making them available in a format similar to chamber roll call votes would be a useful improvement. * Legislators are referenced in the ALISON system but the only place to get the vital information on a legislator, information such as their district, party, and term, is via a completely separate roster page (http://www.legislature.state.al.us/house/representatives/houseroster_alpha.html).

This effectively means that all of the historical data in prior legislatures is of limited use, as it would be impossible to say for sure whether the Jack Williams that introduced a piece of legislation in 2002 is the same currently serving. Ideally, unique identifiers should be specified for each artifact in the system to aid in cross-referencing. Most systems already have these identifiers internally, so it is typically not a great deal of effort to open these up to the outside world. These identifiers can prove extremely helpful in resolving cases where two legislators share a common name or even a similar name. If each vote is accompanied by the legislators ID number or a link to the legislators bio page these mistakes cannot occur. * Bill actions are provided by ALISON but omit several important pieces of data. Actions currently have no indication of which chamber the action occurred in, taking a cue from other states and adding a simple indicator of if an action took place in the House or Senate would be very useful. Also, it appears that where actions take place on the same day they are not kept in chronological order. Providing a timestamp or taking care to properly order the actions would remedy this issue. Finally, adoption of a general bill status would be tremendously useful: a field that indicated where in the general process a bill is (Introduced, Committee Calendar, Voted - House, Voted - Senate, Passed, Vetoed, etc.) Together these additions would make it much easier to read and understand bill history. Timeliness No indication is given of how timely the data is, one can assume it is updated in close to real time, but a statement either affirming this or stating what the typical delay is would help users understand for what purposes they can rely upon the data. Additionally it would be a beneficial feature to be able to see the last time that the system (or better yet, individual documents within the system) were updated. This can reduce redundancy as people aim to keep their records in sync with the official state site. Ease of Access The ALISON system is quite difficult to navigate, in several of the browser-OS combinations tested it refused to load pages. It also uses unintuitive user interface (UI) elements, a prime example being how to view details for a bill. When a bill page is loaded it has a button with the bill number such as HB 1, clicking this button will make links at the top of the page activate which the user must then notice and click to see the relevant information. This is exceptionally unintuitive, even users with a long history using computers are not used to this style of interaction, and may think that the button is not working or that the links dont go anywhere if they havent already selected the appropriate button. Javascript is required to use ALISON which presents a problem to users of older browsers and more importantly a real accessibility concern. Users with poor vision that rely on screen-readers rely on special purpose browsers that while sophisticated enough to find links would likely have a very difficult time with the aforementioned click button, then click link process that relies

heavily on visual indicators. It should be possible for each page on ALISON to be accessible as a permanent URL linked together with standard practice HTML links. There is nothing about the nature of the ALISON data that prevents this. The ultimate in ease of access is the provision of bulk downloads, a single download per session (or perhaps one per chamber depending on preference) means drastically reduced site load, little to no chance of user error, and ensures timely access to the data. States including New Hampshire and North Carolina have begun offering archive (.zip) files with all of the relevant data in a machine readable format. Machine Readability All data provided on the Alabama Legislatures website is available in HTML, which from a machine readability perspective is acceptable, but not the preferred mechanism. For programs to make additional use of Alabamas legislative data (such as import into voter information websites, mobile applications, or other tools) a more machine-friendly format would be preferable. Examples of such formats would be CSV files that can be opened in Microsoft Excel among other programs, JSON or XML format data or even SQL dumps if that is the underlying format. Some states also make data available in their own formats, which are acceptable so long as they are well documented and kept uniform. Bill Text is currently only available as PDF files, making a plain text version of bills available would be an improvement that would enable developers to more easily make use of bill text for things like full text search. Alabama should be applauded however for avoiding the use of PDFs for metadata, HTML is highly preferable to this alternative as PDFs can make the data completely inaccessible. States including Mississippi, Kansas, and Ohio have begun offering XML, JSON, and CSV access to bill information. Authentication & Permanence Users of Alabamas legislative data will often wish to prove that they are using the official sources, the best way of doing so is to provide all users with links back to the official website so that users can compare for themselves to see that nothing has been modified or corrupted. Unfortunately it is exceptionally difficult to link into the ALISON system, links to specific pages are possible, but they lose the surrounding frame. For example this link to HB1 in the most recent session: http://alisondb.legislature.state.al.us/acas/ACTIONHistoryResultsMac.asp? OID=65386&LABEL=HB1 when originally viewed on Alabamas website had a frame around it

containing links to other sections such as sponsors. The framed approach is not only difficult to navigate, it makes it impossible to provide accurate source links for citations of the system. The vast majority of state legislatures make permalinks to individual bill pages possible. Licensing There is no clear licensing information given, the default then being that as a government work it is public domain. This, like the issue of timeliness, would best be addressed in a short About page that details acceptable and unacceptable use, though care should be taken not to prevent the public from doing what they wish with what is public data. Unacceptable use should likely be limited to unauthorized access.