The project I worked on during Health 2.0 Houston's Hackathon March 2013 for Open Legislatr: http://openlegislatr.org/. This project was developed using Gerald Rich's idea (and lots of his sweat/brain power) for Code for America's Houston Brigade projects. The application development was led by Paul Kwiatkowski, the co-founder of GroupRaise.com. Peter Darke provided invaluable consulting on the data architecture for the application. Find out more about Health 2.0 Houston: http://health20houston.com and Code for Houston: http://codeforhouston.com. Fork Open Legislatr and Contribute to the Project on Github: https://github.com/codeforhouston/open-legislatr

1. OPEN LEGISLATR
THE OPEN WAY TO TRACK CHANGING
HEALTHCARE LEGISLATION
A Project by Code for America’s Houston Brigade
@OpenTXLege | #TXLege | OpenLegislatr.org
Sunday, March 24, 13

2. OPEN LEGISLATR
OVERVIEW
The Problem & Our Solution
Demo of Application
Market Potential
Usefulness/Applicability
Level of technical and user design
@OpenTXLege | #TXLege | OpenLegislatr.org
Sunday, March 24, 13

3. THE PROBLEM
No Way to Track Changes in Texas Legislation
@OpenTXLege | #TXLege | OpenLegislatr.org
Sunday, March 24, 13
Imagine you are interested in keeping track of changes to a healthcare bill in the Texas
Legislature.
How do you do this?
Currently this process is really painful and looks like this...

4. CURRENTLY, WHEN A BILL’S STATUS
CHANGES - YOU HAVE TO INITIATE A
NEW SEARCH
@OpenTXLege | #TXLege | OpenLegislatr.org
Sunday, March 24, 13
http://www.capitol.state.tx.us/resources/FollowABill.aspx
The site explains how to follow a bill - their instructions direct you to a new URL or
notification system/calendar for each of the different status changes.
Currently, each time there is a status change in a Bill, anyone trying to follow those updates
has to seek a new information source to find out what’s new.

5. OPEN
LEGISLATR
SENDS YOU
THE LATEST
STATUS
UPDATES
@OpenTXLege | #TXLege | OpenLegislatr.org
Sunday, March 24, 13
Open Legislatr is going change that and make it easier for you to track bill changes by
sending status changes and the key information about those changes directly to you, in real
time.

6. DEMO SLIDE
http://openlegislatr.org/
@OpenTXLege | #TXLege | OpenLegislatr.org
Sunday, March 24, 13
As compared to the option of entering your own custom search or specify the Bill you want to
track, look at how the current search is set-up - http://www.capitol.state.tx.us/Reports/
BillsBySubject.aspx?ID=subject&LegSess=83R&Cat=I
(It’s painful - you’ve been warned)

7. MARKET AUDIENCE
Journalists
Healthcare Professionals
Lobbyists/ PACs
Educational Institutes/ISDs
Pharmaceutical
Insurance/Medicare
Lawyers
@OpenTXLege | #TXLege | OpenLegislatr.org
Sunday, March 24, 13
All of these groups of people have an ongoing need for up to date healthcare legislation data in order to
make informed decisions, forecast and prepare for industry changes, and educate the public and
politicians about key issues.

8. HOW WE’RE
DIFFERENT...
@OpenTXLege | #TXLege | OpenLegislatr.org
Sunday, March 24, 13
• value proposition/competitive advantage
no one else let’s you search by topics
none track the trends in most popular Bills, most tweeted/socially shared

9. STRATEGY
@OpenTXLege | #TXLege | OpenLegislatr.org
Sunday, March 24, 13
The Plan for Expanding and Growing our User Base:
Use Code for America’s Network of Cities to Integrate More State Legislation Data through API’s, and
Continue Development of the App plus gather the data on
* the most popular Bills by keywords
*analytics on who’s influential on twitter and other social networks
* what key trends in state legislation changes are occurring online

10. WE ALL NEED UP-TO-DATE
LEGISLATION DATA
@OpenTXLege | #TXLege | OpenLegislatr.org
Sunday, March 24, 13
Usefulness/Applicability:
* relevance to health tech - changes in health related legislation helps keep the public better informed
and helps healthcare industry experts track relevant legal changes and trends so they can make better
decisions.
* would the target audience actually use it? - Definitely - the user experience was ultimately our focus
in designing the search tools and the information feed on the front end. On the back end, the data
we’re tracking on search phrases most commonly used, Bills viewed, and social engagement and
influencers segmented by topic/Bill is invaluable to understanding voter interest in different legislative
issues.
* does this tech take into consideration challenges specific to health tech?
every day there is a group protesting outside the capital - they all need up to date information

11. http://openstates.org/api/
OPEN SOURCE ON GITHUB
@OpenTXLege | #TXLege | OpenLegislatr.org
Sunday, March 24, 13
Level of technical and user design:
integration of technical components (APIs and datasets)
- tumblr and Ruby on Rails
- RSS feeds
- API datasets: currently just the Open States API by the Sunlight Foundation, but we’ve built backend
functionality into the app that makes it easy to plug in additional API’s to expand or customize to pull
in the data sets specifically wanted by different states and legislative topics.
degree of function/completeness - about 80% complete right now
Ways we’ve improved User Experience from the competition:
• better search tools (mentioned earlier)
• RSS feeds of each Bill and the changes
• User can subscribe to receive notifications for a specific Bill and track changes, pass/fail, votes, and
more

12. THE TEAM
Gerald A. Rich Paul Kwiatkowski
Project Lead Application Developer
Sarah M Worthy Peter Darke
User Experience Data Architect
Sunday, March 24, 13
We all do other things and these are our roles with developing Open Legislatr

13. OPEN LEGISLATR
@OpenTXLege
http://openlegislatr.org/
THANK YOU!
@OpenTXLege | #TXLege | OpenLegislatr.org
Sunday, March 24, 13