Joint House and Senate Floor Calendar as PDF and Data

[DanielSchuman]

This is a feature request. Congress.gov maintains a floor calendar page that links to the House and Senate's floor calendars.

The House and Senate make their respective information publicly available, but generally not in a digital format. The print PDFs that they publish likely are hard to read for people with visual disabilities. And there’s no official combined version.

Congress.gov should publish a combined print version and publish the joint calendar in a digital format (iCAL and Google Calendar). The public should be able to download and subscribe to that calendar. As an example, I have done so here.

In the House

House Majority Steve Scalise publishes the Republican House 2024 calendar as a PDF, with yellow highlights on blue text, which can be hard for some people with disabilities to read. They do not publish it as data, such as in a Google calendar or iCal format.

House Minority Leader Katherine Clark publishes the Republican House 2024 calendar in a variety of formats, both print (PDF) and digital (Google, Apple, Outlook). House Democrats have maintained their calendar this way for years.

In the Senate The Senate publishes its calendar as a list of dates with somewhat confusing language (“convene,” “state work period) and also as a PDF with dates in red text or blue, which can be hard for some people with disabilities to read. There is no official digital format as far as I know.

Why The Library of Congress Should Publish a Joint Digital Calendar

1. Most people look to Congress.gov as an authoritative source of information about congressional activities. They are more likely to find the calendar on Congress.gov's website than via the House or Senate websites.
2. A combined calendar is useful for everyone, especially those who need visibility into both chambers simultaneously. This applies to staff in the House, Senate, support offices and agencies, the executive branch, journalists, and everyone else.
3. The House is unlikely to publish Senate information. The Senate is unlikely to publish House information. But the Library of Congress can publish both.
4. The Library of Congress is an authoritative source of primary and secondary congressional information. This is the kind of service that the Library can best and appropriately provide.
5. Having generated my own joint calendar for 2024, it only takes an hour to do the initial work. And then it needs to be maintained by monitoring the activities of the chamber -- for which they send out regular notices. Monitoring this kind of information is something the Library does anyway. This would be another related task to do.
6. It would solve issues for people with disabilities, such as those who cannot read the text in the House or Senate produced calendars. The Library has a mission to serve everyone, and this would expand the American people's access to this important information.

[DanielSchuman]

Where is the feedback repository? Is there a better place to submit feature requests for congress.gov? @apreiter18

[mnewatloc]

This repository is specifically for Congress.gov API requests and issues. For requests and feedback related to the Congress.gov website, please use the following survey: https://www.research.net/r/congress-gov-feedback

Congress.gov feedback from this survey, along with feedback from other sources like the Congress.gov Public Forum and In Custodia Legis comments, is logged and discussed by the Library of Congress for feasibility and implementation. Thank you.

[DanielSchuman]

Thank you for the response. If you wish all requests and feedback related to Congress.gov that is unrelated to the Congress.gov API to be submitted via the form, may I respectfully suggest that the intake form be improved?

Here is what the intake form looks like currently. The circled area is where congress.gov feedback (feature requests, issues) are supposed to be provided.

As you can see, there is only a single line for feedback. It is not possible to expand the text box, for example, so that you can see what you are writing. That makes it difficult to provide sufficient information, whether paragraph length or longer.

In addition, there is no way to include images when one runs into issues.

The form also requests a lot of other information that is unrelated to the request and not always appropriate to answer. The nature of your search activities is orthogonal to whether you want a feature or have a question.

In addition, if you wish to submit multiple items, the form does not make it clear that you can do so either in that form or by submitting another item. And if you have several items to submit, why must you fill out the same items in #1-5 for each form?

GitHub provides a superior mechanism to provide feedback. It allows for documentation and discussion. It surfaces issues so that others can respond -- at the Library and elsewhere.

Not everyone knows how to use GitHub or is an expert at doing so. It addresses a particular community -- those who are more comfortable with technology. To address that users of the form and of GitHub do not constitute entirely overlapping communities, comments submitted through the form interface could be published to GitHub, after being reviewed to scrub any PII or inappropriate materials.

However, if the Library prefers to stick with a form as a method for intake, perhaps it can be improved by allowing for the expansion of the text field to multiple lines, the use of markdown, the ability to insert images, and guidance and information about how to submit multiple items (and that submitting multiple items are welcome.)

I hope that this feedback is taken as a constructive suggestion that will help improve the range and quality of feedback received by the Library. Thank you for the opportunity to engage.