An automated legislative calendar using IFTTT?
One of the projects I’ve been working on in the background as I try and keep up with the maelstrom is figuring out how to get notifications in real-time about bills being introduced. I’m still working the bugs out, but this calendar is based on an IFTTT applet using the same general principle as the news tracker, part of the GayAgenda suite of tools.
You can read more about the main project — which tracks news coverage of trans-related topics and generates data visualizations — here, or visit the GitHub repo here.
How does it work?
Updates are pushed directly to the calendar by IFTTT, software which allows you to create “applets” linking various apps on your phone and on the web. The project this is a deviation from this one (which, admittedly, is a deviation from actual work I should probably doing) which links Google Alerts, an RSS reader and Google Sheets.
A fork of that applet was created to do the same with a LegiScan alert set up via RSS for the keyword “gender”. Calendar invites are added automatically as the LegiScan database updates. For certain states, IFTTT then uses PushBullet to send notifications to specific devices, or in certain instances, sends a text message via SMS to a specified phone number.
Currently I’m refining a version that will distinguish between bills focused on sexual orientation and those focused on gender identity, and which target the entire LGBTQ community. Stay tuned, updates on Mastodon and Twitter.
We’re living in a wild dystopian hellscape but the future is wild, no?
A couple of notes:
There is some delay between when LegiScan pushes updates to the RSS feed and putting it on the calendar due to the use of IFTTT as an intermediary service to link to the Google Suite. I may eventually streamline this in Python, but first I have SO MANY manuscripts to finish so I likely won’t until the summer.
I haven’t yet started building advanced operators into the LegiScan query to weed out queries unrelated to gender and am pruning a little by hand. I will probably duplicate this experiment with a more advanced query soon and publish it here so people can use it, although if I really hate myself I might just learn TypeScript as the language which IFTTT uses for filtering.
Regarding the above, there is some complexity in the fact that many senators, at the behest of their far-right overlords are encouraging people to not use the word “gender” at all, and instead use phrases like “identifying as a different sex than their biological sex”, which has been a bit of a curveball in the larger GayAgenda project. I’ll add search terms to the RSS feed, but will necessarily have to use some NLP to filter out false positives.
There are some dates missing from earlier in the month as the link got turned off. It should be all fixed now! Please don’t angrily email me about things being wrong. I’m technically fallable!
