propublica / disbursements

Processing House Disbursements

This repository contains various scripts for manipulating the House's expenditure (disbursement) reports, published at disbursements.house.gov.

Process for parsing disbursements

1. When new disbursement reports are released, quarterly, download the latest "single volume" PDF for that quarter.

2. Chop that PDF off at either end so that it contains strictly pages reflecting actual disbursement records.

3. Extract the text from that PDF, and run it through the Python script in 1_pdf_to_csv/ to generate CSVs.

4. Take the generated CSVs and run them through the Ruby scripts in 2_add_bioguide_id/ to add a Bioguide ID column to those CSVs. If you get the Unquoted fields do not allow \r or \n error, check bioguide_ids.csv and fix any additions.

5. Publish them to Sunlight's expenditure reports page. Sunlight staff with appropriate access can publish the CSVs to Amazon S3 with s3cmd put -P -m text/csv [*.csv] s3://assets.sunlightfoundation.com/expenditures/house/, and update the page through the Django CMS.

6. Take the detail CSV only and run it through the 4 Ruby scripts in 3_extract_staffers/ to generate new CSVs of various staff records (staffers.csv, titles.csv, offices.csv, and positions.csv).

7. Take those four CSVs and load them into Sunlight's House Staff Directory, using the instructions at sunlightlabs/staffers.

We also save various versions of the data along the way in an internal Dropbox account.

Public domain

This project is dedicated to the public domain. As spelled out in CONTRIBUTING:

The project is in the public domain within the United States, and copyright and related rights in the work worldwide are waived through the CC0 1.0 Universal public domain dedication.

All contributions to this project will be released under the CC0 dedication. By submitting a pull request, you are agreeing to comply with this waiver of copyright interest.