More by Alt Leg

Alt Leg is a collection of tools anyone can use to have an easier time interacting with the Arizona legislature. Started as a simple set of quick links to key resources, it now includes a dashboard with live video, bill tracking, score cards, and more.

Dashboard

The homepage of Alt Leg is designed to be a better homepage for the Arizona Legislature. It offers quick access to information about schedules, amendments, members, and more. And while committees and floor are active, it aggregates all of the live feeds so that you don’t have to manage a half-dozen different tabs.

Lists

Lists is a power tool for bill tracking. Rules and combinations of rules based on RTS data, vote records, sponsorship, committee assignments, and more help you to build lists without the tedium of tracking everything down and adding bills manually. With each list, you can bookmark other lists and copy bills between them, allowing for a simple triage operation or an easy way to share a group of related lists with only a single link. Lists are shareable in editable and read-only modes, and will highlight which bills are scheduled for committee or floor on a given day.

Alignments

The data that powers Lists opens up some interesting opportunities for analysis. Alignments uses cosine similarity to compare vote records on your lists and a density based spatial clustering algorithm with noise to show the voting blocks and relationships that exist within the legislature across different issues.

Votes

An add-on to Lists, Votes allows you to add a thumbs up or thumbs down to each bill to share your positions and to power a live scorecard for legislators. Throughout the session (or for previous sessions) you’ll be able to show which legislators are living up to your values on the bills you care about.

Ragoût

Ragoût is a dedicated site that allows you to search three decades of bills simultaneously. This search tool exists to answer a very common problem; when reading a section of statute you might wonder, “but where does this language come from?” Without spending a lot of money on reference materials, there hasn’t been an easy way to figure that out, but with Ragoût you can simply copy the sentence you’re curious about into the search field and find every bill that ever included it. When researching a topic or drafting a bill, this historical search function is a huge time saver.