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 House of Delegates may oppose transparency, but the Senate is at least conceptually OK with it. The Senate provides a live video stream of floor sessions. It’s only available via Windows Media Player, there’s never enough bandwidth for many people to watch at once, and they don’t archive it — if the middle of the work day isn’t a good time for you to watch, you’re out of luck. But they are doing it, and they deserve credit for that. You can tune in whenever the Senate is convened, generally around noon on weekdays.

With the open of the sixty day General Assembly today, the House of Delegates debated a pair of open government measures, and both failed.

House Minority Leader Del. Ward Armstrong (D-Martinsville) introduced a rules change to require that House floor sessions be broadcast for the public to observe. After a brief debate, with Del. Terry Kilgore (R-Gate City) speaking against the proposal, the plan was defeated, 55-43.

House Democrats also proposed overturning the 2006 change in legislative process that allows subcommittees — with just two votes required — to kill bills with secret votes. In 2006, 491 bills were killed secretly. That number rocketed to 840 in last year’s session. Del. Ken Plum (D-Fairfax) spoke in favor of the change, while House Majority Leader Morgan Griffith (R-Salem) opposed it, claiming that writing down who votes for what isn’t “efficient.” That proposal, likewise, failed, so the General Assembly will continue to hold hundreds of votes in secret.

Ironically, the House Democratic Caucus recorded these two debates, and has made each of them available on their blog — live broadcasting and recording votes.

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.

You don’t just have to list bills in your Photosynthesis portfolio — you can advocate for or against them, too, so that anybody viewing your public portfolio can see your arguments. While viewing your portfolio, look over on the far right side of any table row listing a bill. You’ll see two letters — “x” and “e.” These little links mean “delete” and “edit,” respectively. (We’ll have something less cryptic soon — we promise.)

Click on the “e” next to the bill that you want to write up your position on, and you’ll be presented with a text box where you can write whatever you like. Basic HTML is permitted, and you can write as much as you want. Whether you want to provide a few words or an entire position paper, just text or embed YouTube video, that’s your space to try to persuade others to see things from your perspective.

Right now your notes appear only in your portfolio, but soon enough they’ll be integrated with the comments within bill pages, which will put your $0.02 in front of hundreds or thousands of readers.

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.

Since last April’s Virginia Tech shootings, there’s been a lot of talk of mental health being the leading issue for the 2008 General Assembly session. Today, a slew of mental health bills were pre-filed, largely by Sen. Janet Howell and Sen. Ken Cuccinelli. More are surely in the pipeline.

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.

The first prefiled bills — those bills filed before the session begins — started rolling in a month ago now. But legislators are just now hitting their stride, with 66 of the 187 bills having been filed in the past two working days alone. Some themes have emerged, as you can see in this graph of bill topics (or “tag cloud,” as it’s known):

Of course, they’re just getting warmed up. When all’s said and done, somewhere around 3,500 bills are likely to be filed. You can keep up with them all on our bills page or, if you prefer, just choose the tag of your choice from the above list and bookmark that page — new bills on that topic will appear as they’re filed.

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!