March 13, 2013 08:42 AM UTC

Sunshine Week: Colorado Legislature Gets an "F?"

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• by: Colorado Pols

The Sunlight Foundation, a top nonpartisan open government watchdog based in Washington DC, has among its many responsibilities something called the "Open States Project," which attempts to compile and organize legislative information for all fifty states into a unified searchable index. Each state's information portal for legislative proceedings is different, of course, and some states have significantly more accessible data than others.

And as they released in their "Legislative Data Report Card" Monday, Colorado's legislative data is about as inaccessible as it gets.

In the course of writing scrapers for all 50 state legislatures, our Open States team and volunteers spent a lot of time looking at state legislative websites and struggling with the often inadequate information made available.  Impossibly difficult to navigate sites, information going missing and gnarly PDFs of tabular data have become daily occurrences for those of us working on Open States. People are always curious to know how their state stacked up compared to others — in fact one of the most frequent questions we have been asked has been “so which state was the worst?”  That question got us thinking:  How could we derive a measure of how “open” a state’s legislative data was?

After some consideration, we came up with six criteria on which each state could be evaluated, based on six of the Ten Principles for Opening Up Government Information: completeness, timeliness, ease of access, machine readability, use of commonly owned standards and permanence…

Evaluating each state on each criteria was a large task, and with community support we ensured that each state was evaluated by multiple people.  After the evaluation was complete, we converted the qualitative data on how a state performed to numeric scores (specific scoring details are available on the report card itself).  After summing these scores, states were also assigned a letter grade according to where they fell among their peers.  A state with a net score below negative one was given an F, a negative one or zero became a D.  With the average total score among states being a 1.5, we gave states with a net score of one or two a C, three became a B, and four and above became an A.

The final breakdown was 8 As, 11 Bs, 20 Cs, 6 Ds, and 6 Fs.

Here's how Colorado earned an "F"…

Under "Machine Readability," Sunlight complains that votes are only available via old-school .PDF, making them much more difficult to "scrape" or copy out to an external database for tabulation. Under "Permanence," which at "-2" was a major component of Colorado's failing grade, they complain that URLs to bills and other records on Colorado legislative website change–which is huge problem for anyone trying to externally link to them. The "0" scores in the other areas indicate minimal or average compatibility–see this guide to their methodology for more information. The one thing they apparently do well, and our experience agrees, is updating on a timely schedule.

This is a useful comparative look at something all of us involved primarily with one state's politics use constantly. The permanent URL issue is something we too have struggled with, and we've heard in recent years, particularly as other states have modernized their websites, that our legislative records were prohibitively difficult to export due to reliance on outdated document types and a lack of machine-readable data. We certainly don't think this has been intentionally neglected, any more than other infamously creaky Colorado state information systems–but we would love to see a bill appropriating the modest amount it would take to bring www.leg.state.co.us into the 2010s.