Blog
Election Day, Topic Modeling, & Presidential Race Chat
October 31, 2024
As Election Day approaches, we're excited to share some major developments. Our team has continued to grow, and we're working to make political data more accessible than ever. Our new topic modeling system now accurately categorizes tens of thousands of Congressional bills, while our enhanced LLM Chats — including a dedicated Presidential Race Chat - are ready to answer your election-related questions.
The Team Grows, LLM Chat, & More
August 14, 2024
This month, our team grew in size! We're also releasing a beta version of a Chat LLM to help search through thousands of U.S. congressional bills, and many more updates.
Near-Real-Time Data Collection, Reliability, & Scale
July 10, 2024
We’ve finished a number of big updates for By The Topics, including improving our data collection efforts, adding a new Bills feed, updating our frontend to Solid Start 1.0, migrating to Moka for server caching, and rewriting our data pipelines. We’re also excited to share with you the alpha version of Law, People and Topic subscriptions.
Seeing the Bills That Congressmembers Support
March 25, 2024
This month, we're excited to share some developments that will provide users with higher-level insights. We've added two new sections to all congressmember profiles that show which bills the congressmember supports and which bills they're against. At a quick glance, you can easily see whether or not a congressmember supports a bill, and also what that bill is about.
Seeing the Bills That Congressmembers Create
January 31, 2024
Our goal with By The Topics has been to make it incredibly easy for you to understand what progress a politician has made for you and others in your community. This month, we've made great strides toward that effort by adding a "Bills created by" section to each congressmember's profile page.
Presidents, Executive Orders, and TF-IDF
December 18, 2023
This month, we've made a concerted effort to add the first bit of presidential data: executive orders. Up until this point, our focus has almost exclusively been on U.S. congressional data. With the addition of president profiles and executive orders, we're making strides to cover the entire political landscape in the US.
Making It Easier to Understand Legislation With Goals and Synopses
November 13, 2023
We've added two new sections to bill pages: goals and synopses. Goals and synopses are small summaries which help identify what the legislation is about in only a few words. Our goal (no pun intended) is to eventually add goals and synopses to every single piece of legislation.
Searching By Topic
October 10, 2023
Previously, users were only able to see topics as small tags on voting records and bills. With Topic pages, and the ability to search by topic, users can now see a list of U.S. congressional bills that are associated with a given topic.
A First Look at Topics
September 13, 2023
In the past month, we've added two new big features to the platform: topics and bill pages. Each bill page is tagged with topics which help users identify what the bill is about. Voting records on profile pages now also show the topics that belong to the associated bill for the voting record.
A First Look at Search
July 24, 2023
The site is starting to take shape as users are now able to search for any congressmember and see their complete voting records. We believe that finding a congressmember's voting records is now faster and easier on our site than anywhere else on the internet.
A First Look at Profile Pages
June 26, 2023
Since April, we've been collecting congressional bill data, congressmember data, and voting records. Today, I'm happy to share a first look at profile pages. A lot of the data we've been collecting will eventually be on these pages.
Exploring U.S. Congressional Data
April 29, 2023
Providing accurate, easily understood information on politicians and where they stand on various topics is a big undertaking. Providing accurate, truthful information about anything on the internet is a challenge on its own.