Determine how to associate Congress number with terms

[GPHemsley]

There are actually two separate issues here which may or may not be solved with a single solution:

• How do we best associate a term with a single Congress (Representatives)?
• How do we best associate a term with multiple Congresses (Senators, Presidents, Resident Commissioners)?

I mentioned a few possible solutions in #15, some of which were controversial.

[GPHemsley]

I just realized that I was conflating the yaml representation with the XML representation, especially in my comment in #15. Clearly, it is not a big deal to just have a list of Congresses associated with a term. (Potentially allowing representatives' terms to use a single string/int instead of a list.)

[konklone]

We'd probably want to have it be the same data type (string or array) for both reps and sens, to keep parsing saner, but yeah, an array would handle the ambiguity.

[GPHemsley]

Oh, right, because Resident Commissioners are listed under "rep". So list it is!

[konklone]

Well, actually, I think we should change the title for Resident Commissioners to "Com", and Delegates to "Del". (These are the actual titles they use.) We added a "chamber" field at my suggestion so that titles could diversify more easily.

For example, it's possible that someday the Senate might get delegates - a Senate committee came within one vote of passing a bill that would have given PR a non-voting Senate delegate:
http://www.dcvote.org/trellis/research/rimensnydersenatedelegate.cfm

I think Josh objected earlier because it would require some GovTrack work, so we might want to put Com/Del titles in the little bucket of things to wait a few weeks on. But either way, a list of one congress for House members isn't the end of the world, it's worth it for consistency.

[JoshData]

Let's punt the question of chamber vs title to another issue. For that, someone's going to have to do some research for the historical data.

But I'm ok with whatever you guys decide for adding congresses to each role.

[konklone]

Good point on the historical data.

What is this issue trying to solve, btw? When would someone need to
determine which congress a term belonged to? The Senate class is enough to
determine when someone's up for re-election.

On Tue, Jan 8, 2013 at 7:50 PM, Joshua Tauberer notifications@github.comwrote:

Let's punt the question of chamber vs title to another issue. For that,
someone's going to have to do some research for the historical data.

But I'm ok with whatever you guys decide for adding congresses to each
role.

—
Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHubhttps://github.com//issues/18#issuecomment-12026089.

Developer | sunlightfoundation.com

[GPHemsley]

I've spun off the issue on chamber/types into #26 (though I suppose it could be debated as whether a third issue is needed to discuss titles).

As for a Congress: It would be a way to short-circuit the lookup of a Congress from the dates of a term. I'm not sure there's an immediate usecase right now, but it's an important bit of information to have, especially as we get further and further away from the date-Congress mappings we're familiar with. (Like, if I said the person served in 1873, could you tell me what Congress that was without having to do a bunch of math?)

[GPHemsley]

Oh, one usecase might be to answer this question: What Congresses did this person serve in?

Then all you'd have to do is look at the congress field in all their terms.

[JoshData]

When updating an existing db from the YAML, matching terms to existing records is not really well defined without a primary key or some other constraint. Congress numbers would help that. (This was my major issue last week.)

[konklone]

Well I'm certainly not opposed to it, if it's easy enough to keep up to
date.

On Wed, Jan 9, 2013 at 12:35 PM, Joshua Tauberer
notifications@github.comwrote:

When updating an existing db from the YAML, matching terms to existing
records is not really well defined without a primary key or some other
constraint. Congress numbers would help that. (This was my major issue last
week.)

—
Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHubhttps://github.com//issues/18#issuecomment-12056807.

Developer | sunlightfoundation.com

[konklone]

This seems to have stalled - let's re-open it when we have a plan of action.

[GPHemsley]

This should probably be reopened, since @dwillis is working on it.

[konklone]

Nah, then we'd have two issues open for it. :) I can't handle all these
tickets!

On Thu, Mar 7, 2013 at 12:55 PM, Gordon P. Hemsley <notifications@github.com

wrote:

This should probably be reopened, since @dwillishttps://github.com/dwillisis working on it.

—
Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHubhttps://github.com//issues/18#issuecomment-14575824
.

Developer | sunlightfoundation.com

[GPHemsley]

What's the second one? #41 is for how someone got into their position, which is a completely separate issue.

[konklone]

Derek's doing both at the same time, I think, so he can close it out all at
once. We could update the title or description of #41 to mention adding a
congress attribute.

On Thu, Mar 7, 2013 at 1:40 PM, Gordon P. Hemsley
notifications@github.comwrote:

What's the second one? #41https://github.com/unitedstates/congress-legislators/issues/41is for how someone got into their position, which is a completely separate
issue.

—
Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHubhttps://github.com//issues/18#issuecomment-14578263
.

Developer | sunlightfoundation.com