We’re excited to present an important new feature on Richmond Sunlight: complete, unedited video of the Senate floor sessions. It’s one thing to read about what’s going on in the legislature, but it’s another entirely to be able to watch. Though the Senate already provides live video, this new video is archived for the ages, integrated with the rest of Richmond Sunlight, and uploaded to Google Video for anybody to download, remix, embed, sample, and otherwise play with. All of this is possible thanks to a generous grant from The Sunlight Foundation (no relation), which has provided us with the money necessary to purchase daily session DVDs from the Senate Clerk’s office and free them for everybody to have.

These videos will be added to each day’s official minutes, which we’re now archiving (see the Senate’s February 13th minutes, for instance), going back to the beginning of the session. And each bill’s page will report the days in which a bill came up on the floor of the Senate and thus may well have been discussed on video — see, for example, Del. Matt Lohr’s HB886.

Here is, to demonstrate, the video for last Thursday:

Clicking on that little Google Video icon in the lower right hand corner will take you to Google Video’s page for that Senate video, where you can find a link to embed the video on your own site or e-mail it to a friend.

It will take us a week or so to get the contents all of these DVDs up onto Google Video and integrated into the site, but expect to see more and more video archived on and integrated with the site each day.