Govkit

Govkit is a Ruby gem that provides simple access to US open government APIs around the web, including:

OpenCongress, which has an API for federal bills, votes, people, and news and blog coverage
The Open States project, which has a RESTful API for accessing data about state legislators, bills, votes, etc.
Project Vote Smart, which has an API with congressional addresses, etc.
Follow The Money, whose API reveals campaign contribution data for state officials.
TransparencyData API (campaign contributions only)

Installation

From gemcutter:

gem install govkit

Setup

Add govkit to your environment.rb or Gemfile

Run rails generate govkit (Rails 3.x) or script/generate govkit (Rails 2.x) to copy a config file into config/initializers/govkit.rb. You will need to add your API keys to this config file.

Outside of Rails you can configure your API keys like so:

>> GovKit.configure do |config|
>>   config.sunlight_apikey   = 'YOUR_SUNLIGHT_API_KEY'
>>   config.votesmart_apikey  = 'YOUR_VOTESMART_API_KEY'
>>   config.ftm_apikey        = 'YOUR_FTM_API_KEY'
>> end

Usage Examples

>> GovKit::OpenStates::State.find_by_abbreviation('CA')
>> GovKit::VoteSmart::Address.find(votesmart_candidate_id)
>> GovKit::OpenCongress::Bill.find(:number => 5479, :type => 'h', :congress => '111')

Objects returned from GovKit will have attributes for each field coming back from the API:

>> x = GovKit::OpenStates::State.find_by_abbreviation('CA')
=> #<GovKit::OpenStates::State:0x00000100f6a5a8 @attributes={"lower_chamber_title"=>"Assemblymember", "lower_chamber_name"=>"Assembly", "upper_chamber_title"=>"Senator", "terms"=>[#<GovKit::OpenStates::State::Term:0x00000100f2a8e0 @attributes={"....
>> x.name
=> "California"

GovKit will raise GovKit::ResourceNotFound if a requested item isn't available.

Testing & Debugging

For debugging purposes, there's a raw_response reader provided for each object, which typically returns an HTTParty::Response object. To see the body of the HTTP response, you might look here:

(continuing the example from above)
>> x.raw_response.response.body
=> "{\n    \"lower_chamber_title\": \"Assemblymember\", \n    \"lower_chamber_name\": \"Assembly\", \n  ....

Bugs? Questions?

Please join the Govkit Google Group, especially if you'd like to talk about a new feature and get announcements.

Report a bug on our Lighthouse page.

Govkit's main repo is on Github: http://github.com/opengovernment/govkit, where your contributions, forks, and feedback are greatly welcomed.

Dear Canadians

For Canadian open government data, our friends up north have created a govkit-ca gem that lives in the GovKit::CA namespace and should interoperate just fine with this gem.

A GovKit for your country?

Let us know if you'd like to build a govkit for your region! We'd love to link to you. Your gem should be called, for example, govkit-uk (ISO 3166 country code), and your methods should live in the GovKit::GB namespace (for example).