GOP.gov API: Republicans Get First to Government Everywhere

House Republicans have just launched a polished new website at GOP.gov. But as ProgrammableWeb's John Musser reports,, what's likely the most important thing to look for isn't really much to look at. It's the new GOP.gov API, a data portal serving up the government information Hill Republicans are eager to push out into the world. (H/T Patrick Ruffini on Twitter). Here's how GOP.gov describes the new API:

The GOP.gov API is part of House Republicans' commitment to deliver a more open Congress to the people of the United States by facilitating the transmission of information that can be distributed in real time, across any network, to any user.

The GOP.gov API (Application Programming Interface) makes it possible for you to receive data from GOP.gov using HTTP POST calls. There are many situations where this could be useful, including posting information on blogs, websites, software applications and other government webpages.

What's exciting isn't the content the API is serving up. (At least it doesn't seem to be. Without built-out mashups, it's a bit tough for us non-programmer types to get a full view of the potential of the data.) The data streams available -- member and committee information, legislation, and a somewhat mysterious "documents" -- don't go much beyond what's already available in API format from the new New York Times' Congress API, for example.

What's exciting, then, is that Hill Republicans seem willing and even eager to compete on the web, and not simply by just making a copy of what Democrats and progressives have done. You can easily envision a path where tech-defeated conservatives simply said, "Here's an idea! DailyGrover.com..." Instead, they seem to be taking the advice of Karl Rove to stake a claim on the web 3.0.

(For the record, despite the all-encompassing domain name, GOP.gov is actually a project of the House Republican Conference. Chair Mike Pence, a former radio broadcaster in his home state of Indiana, has a record of experimenting with new ways of communicating.)

But what the heck is the web 3.0 Karl Rove's pointing to? It's a great question, and at least part of the answer seems to be evolving out to be that it's where standardized, clean, accessible data is set free to wreak havoc or magic on the web. Hill Republicans get it. They're calling the API "GOP.gov everywhere." And that raises the idea that for all the attention we've been paying whitehouse.gov, maybe thinking about the White House site as a destination is just wrong-headed. The focus should instead, perhaps, be on pushing clean data -- and the engagement it can fuel -- out from the White House , in the hopes of creating "government everywhere."

Ignore, for a moment, the 1984 connotations of the term. The impact could be powerful. Google and Pew tried a version of "government everywhere" with its Voting Information Project (VIP) this fall. The idea there was to standardize information on where, when, and how we vote (which, in one of democracy's best-kept secrets, is a mess of state-level chunks of knowledge). But the idea was never to pull anyone to the rather plain vanilla VIP site. Instead, it was to push out voting information with abandon, so that it might nearly be unavoidable. Your polling place data might pop up in the top corner of your local newspaper website (or print edition). Or it might, as it was, be used to drive advocacy projects like Credo's Mobile's GoVote. With the data standardized and set free, much is possible.

Again and again, Hill Republicans are proving themselves more creative, more ambitious, and more forward-looking than Hill Democrats when it comes to the web. For the record, HouseDemocrats.gov is a placeholder site, reading "coming soon."

ProgrammableWeb has a list of other government APIs.