Wednesday, April 13, 2005

Bill Tracking feature on WV Legislature site up and running

The West Virginia Legislature's website keeps on improving. Though there have been links to "bill tracking" on the site for quite a while, the function is just recently accessible. See it here.

It's pretty simple to use, you create a username/password combination, log-in, and choose bills you wish to track. You can keep and name different lists of bills you are tracking.

The report you get when you check in on the bills you track is a little bit difficult to understand. You first have to know the vocabulary of bills moving through the legislative process, for example the difference between an enrolled bill and an engrossed bill. There is a "date" field, but it's not obvious to what that refers.

Even though the results report is a little difficult to understand, it is useful for seeing whether action is getting taken on any tracked bill, and can alert users to investigate the specifics of the actions taken on bills that interest them.

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