Richmond Sunlight is mostly about telling you what has already happened, but isn’t particularly good at telling you what’s going to happen. In an effort to improve that, we’ve built up a database of committee and subcommittee meeting times and dates, and we’re gradually writing the code to pry upcoming meeting dockets out of the General Assembly’s website. That allows us to notify people when a particular bill is going to come up for a vote, so that they can contact their legislator or attend the meeting. For example, here’s a notice currently appearing on the page for SB376:

Right now this feature is only in place for 20 of the Senate’s 28 subcommittees and none of the House’s 47 subcommittees. It’ll just require a little more boring data entry to get the Senate done. The House will be trickier. Their agenda listings are rendered in Java, which is to Richmond Sunlight as kryptonite is to Superman, and their docket pages have URLs so long that they allow for 4 x 10⁹⁹ (or 0.4 googols) possible dockets, enough for the General Assembly to have a unique URL for every committee docket for every session between now and the heat death of the universe. So…uh…that’ll take us a while.