Exploring the Accessibility of Government Data — Live SMS Legislator Vote Updates

If I had to take a guess, SMS is the most widely obtainable, global modern communications service besides voice calling. All cell phones, from the low end to the flagship have texting, and text-based communications are already widespread and commonplace in daily use and culture. Sure, some social network messengers and other messaging standalone apps might be more used, but access to SMS is still there. And it’s cheap — far cheaper than a data connection.

So it’s no surprise that the number of companies using text-based interaction is on the rise. Some will get it right, and most won’t, but it’s clear that text-based interaction is both something that users are familiar with and something that companies are willing to experiment on.

So how can we take advantage of this widely obtainable service for public benefit? There’s countless answers, and fewer-but-still-countless interesting answers. For one, you can expand access to government data. When a generation is growing up communicating through SMS (et al.), it’s only natural to meet them at their doorstep and bring data to their platform.

Using the Sunlight Foundation’s Congress API, I built a simple application that lets a user subscribe to a up-to-the-minute voting notification for their legislator. It’s not much, but there’s something interesting knowing exactly when your legislator casts their vote and how they sided compared to party lines. It gives some sort personality to an otherwise banal proceeding.

You can find the project code here: https://github.com/tennysonholloway/sms-vote-updates

And the landing page here: https://tennysonholloway.github.io/sms-vote-updates/