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.

We’re excited to announce a new Richmond Sunlight feature: Photosynthesis, a personal bill-tracking system. Photosynthesis makes it a snap to track the bills that interest you, providing you with a custom RSS feed and a personal web page to see their progress. Your portfolio of bills is listed publicly (under your first name and last name initial and, if provided, your organization’s name) at a unique URL, making it a snap to spread the word about what’s important to you. (See my portfolio as an example.) Individuals might use this to inform friends, family, or even blog readers about legislation they should keep an eye on, while organizations could use it to give members an always-up-to-date web page listing legislation relevant to the group’s mission. A quick, free, painless registration with Richmond Sunlight is necessary to sign up — it only takes about thirty seconds.

This is just the first component of Photosynthesis. The next portion, which we’ll roll out shortly, is a professional version suitable for lobbyists, legislative aides and legislators.

One of dozens of projects nominally underway here at Richmond Sunlight is establishing brief biographical sketches of each legislator. Sitting down and hammering out 140 bios just isn’t in the cards, but we’re writing them up for all of the newly-elected legislators as we add them to the system. (For examples, see Del. Don Merricks (R-Danville) or Sen. Don McEachin (D-Richmond).) Because very few legislators have such bios on the site, we’d certainly welcome submissions of them, whether from legislators, their staffs, or anybody who’s interested in taking the time to write 20-100 words about a senator or a delegate. Do us a favor and stick with the existing format — naming employment, political history, education, family, and any unusual biographical highlights — if you’re writing one, and e-mail it to us. Thanks!

The process of updating the site to reflect the still-unfolding changes in legislators is ongoing. Both outgoing and incoming legislators will be listed now through the first day of the session, at which time the list will be updated to exclude all those who will have, by then, formally ceased to be in office. The leadership is still being determined, with committee assignments still being determined. Again, that will be settled by the time things get underway in three weeks’ time, which is when those positions will be updated.