Missing Data: Minnesota Legislation

[gboone]

STATE: MN DATASET: Legislation URL: see comments

Bills before the legislature, and the legislators that comprise it.

Exists: yes Digitized: yes Public: yes Without cost: yes Online: yes Machine-readable: no Available in bulk: no No license restrictions: yes Up-to-date: yes In the state repository: no Verifiable: sometimes Complete: no

Comments: There are a few different sources but all the information we're looking for is available making this a bit tricky. While all the information is available, I'm marking complete "no" because of this:

• Data about house reps is available here: http://www.house.leg.state.mn.us/members/hmem.asp, an excel spreadsheet is available
  • "Date sworn in" is only available on an individual member's page (example: http://www.house.leg.state.mn.us/members/members.asp?id=15390)
• Information about senators is available here: http://www.senate.mn/members/index.php?ls=#alpha, a download of all the senatorial information is not available
  • Navigating to www.senate.mn/senator{{lastname}} will get you to an individual senator's page. In theory you could scrape those pages to get all the information.
• There's also this PDF with information about membership of both houses as of the most recent election.
• Information about bills is available in a machine readable format for each house as a | delimited database file but will be hard to parse since the first line is not column names. House, Senate. This is the only source available over HTTPS by default.

I'm marking machine readable as a no because while scraping HTML and parsing PDFs are possible, it is vastly more effort than consuming structured data files. Where those files exist, they are incomplete.

[waldoj]

I've got this up on the census now—thank you!