Watch the revisions to the bail-out bill | The Open House Project

Watch the revisions to the bail-out bill

October 1st, 2008 by Joshua Tauberer · No Comments

Following John’s note on an OHP mail list email, I adapted the bill comparison tool I developed for GovTrack and used it to analyze the changes made between the draft PDFs that have been circulating of the economic bail-out bill that is now a large package of legislation. I found five drafts, going back to Thursday, September 25 and the latest one from the Senate today. You can see the successive changes from draft to draft here.

It’s not very pretty because while bill writers have been posting the PDFs, PDFs don’t make it easy to make comparisons. The bill writers are composing the bills in XML, and if they made those available we the public would have an easier time. Maybe we wouldn’t complain to our reps so much either because we could actually understand what is going on better!

Tags: Structured Data · data visualization · govtrack · visualizations · xml

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