From Sunlight Foundation:  t’s hard to evaluate the effectiveness of our representatives. This is never more true than at the state level. Their work is often done out of the public’s view and legislation is written in frustratingly complex language. The end result is a massive barrier to civic engagement. Most people don’t even know who their representatives are, let alone, their voting record.

In Colorado, the Open Media Foundation (OMF) is striving to overcome the barriers that prevent people from following their representative’s daily work. We have operated the Colorado Channel for the last eight years, attempting to not only to increase the transparency of our capital, but to build literacy in the legislative process overall.

Every day during the Colorado state legislative session, OMF produces a live broadcast aired throughout the state. These sessions are archived – which dates back to 2008 – and available on demand online. The website features a live agenda stamping tool that allows broadcasters to label events like bill readings or votes. Users may then jump between these events in any session.

These tools were so successful for the Colorado state legislature that OMF abstracted them into a software as a service product, the Open Media Project for Governments. OMF now has many Colorado municipal governments and several out of state governmental entities leveraging the service.

For the Open Media Project for Governments, OMF has leveraged YouTube’s live transcription service to make these sessions searchable by keyword. From topics such as gun rights to the legalization of marijuana, the archives may be searched and recordings found where key decisions were made. The search is performed on speech that is often in simpler terms than the complex titles of bills. The archive and searchable transcripts are a huge step forward in connecting constituents to their representatives.

During the 2015 legislative session, we realized that despite the versatility and exhaustiveness of the session archive, it was still difficult to separate meaningful content from the daily monotony. Connecting who was speaking in a clip to other metadata like bill and subject area, seemed like a great avenue to approach. Listing the times a legislator spoke and on what topic would provide a simple entry point.

Visit Sunlight Foundation for more.