James Turk at the Sunlight Foundation announced important progress today in their Open States Project, to make state legislative information available in e-friendly formats.  They have now brought on line data from New York and Hawaii, bringing their total to 25 states and well on the way to their goal of making all state legislative information available through Open States by 2012.

Open States is an open source collaboration, primarily of programmers, and I've been watching their work for a while now.  Our efforts at Tabulaw in the legislative arena are focused on converting existing statutes and laws into e-friendly formats and providing an accessible user interface for this information.  It will be powerful to cross-link the data on bills and legislative proposals that Open States collects with already enacted state legislation, to show how the proposals would change existing law, and what impact the proposals will have.

Congratulations to Sunlight and the Open States team on this milestone!