The decision of Richmond Sunlight to put video of the floor sessions of both the House and Senate online is an attempt to provide additional access for the general public to floor debate and the legislative process.  Like our elected officials, we want to combat voter apathy and encourage civic participation to ensure our great democracy stands strong and representative.

Our hope is that additional sunlight on Richmond’s debates will facilitate community conversations, online or offline, about the vital issues challenging our Commonwealth and we welcome the continuing opportunities associated with providing this service to the general public.

On the heels of adding Senate video to Richmond Sunlight, we’re pleased to announce the addition of House video, found in the new Minutes section of the site. Like Senate videos, the House videos are sprinkled throughout the site, with links provided from each bill page to every video that includes mention of the bill.

This entire video project is made possible by a grant from The Sunlight Foundation, which has provided us with the money necessary to purchase daily session DVDs from the House Clerk’s office.

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.

We hit a small milestone a few days ago: 100,000 cumulative visits to the website and, in the same day, 500,000 cumulative pages viewed. That’s all come during the thirteen short months in which Richmond Sunlight has existed. We’re grateful to those all of you visiting and promoting Richmond Sunlight. With the rate at which traffic has picked up in the past few weeks, we should reach the 200,000 mark in considerably less than another year.

Sometimes legislators comment on their own bills, but what they write appears just like any other comment, so it can be easy to miss. No longer. Now, when reading comments on bills, it’s now a snap to see when a bill’s patron has spoken up. Their comments are highlighted graphically to call immediate attention to them. For instance, here’s a recent comment by Del. Sal Iaquinto:

For other examples, see comments by Del. Kris Amundson or Del. David Toscano.

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.

This evening we added a new feature to Photosynthesis, the free, custom bill tracking software on Richmond Sunlight. When you make a note about a specific bill (click on the little “e” — for edit — icon on the right side of your bill listing), now that note will appear blended in with the comments on that bill’s page. (For example, you can see one of Virginia Interfaith Center’s own bill notes here.) No longer are your bill notes limited to appearing on your own portfolio page.

Individuals, organizations, businesses and even legislators can take advantage of this by having a single place to put position papers, video, audio, and links to additional resources that provide evidence in support of or against a bill.

Forty eight hours after committee assignments were made, we’ve got them entered into Richmond Sunlight. It’s surprisingly laborious to enter 456 committee assignments for 140 legislators.

The Hampton Roads Daily Press has put together an enormously impressive Legislative Watch section of their website, allowing their readers to keep up with area legislators, and they’ve done it by integrating Richmond Sunlight’s database with their own website. DP readers are shown all ten of their delegates and all five of their senators, and a clever tab-based interface displays legislators’ stats at a glance, including party, district, committees, contact information, bills, and recently-cast votes. The paper even provides a tag cloud of legislation topics and a list of all bills filed.

We have an ever-expanding application programming interface (API) that makes it easy for website developers to pull data from our database and show it on their site, and the Daily Press‘ Aaron Bycoffe has done a bang-up job of doing just that. If you’re interested in integrating portions of Richmond Sunlight into your website, e-mail us and we’ll be happy to help you out.

These are the ten most-watched bills — those bills that the largest number of people have in their Photosynthesis portfolios:

1. HB55: English; designating as official language of State.
2. HB12: Payday lending charges; establishes maximum annual interest rate.
3. SB38: Bipartisan Redistricting Commission; created.
4. SB25: Payday Loan Act; repealing Act referring thereto.
5. SJ7: Constitutional amendment; restoration of civil rights for certain felons.
6. HB81: Abortion; illegal upon overturning of Roe v. Wade.
7. SJ5: Constitutional amendment; establishing Redistricting Commission.
8. HB92: Standards of Quality; requires that average teacher salary be not less than annual national salary.
9. SB8: Absentee voting; qualified voters may vote absentee without providing a reason.
10. HB20: Primary elections; voter registration by political party.