govkit: Open Government APIs in a box

In the same way that Fog aims to be the “Ruby cloud services library” by providing an all-in-one bundle of wrappers for popular cloud services including Amazon, Rackspace, and others, GovKit from OpenGovernment is a Swiss Army Knife of government API wrappers. GovKit currently supports:

• OpenCongress, which has an API for federal bills, votes, people, and news and blog coverage
• The Open States project, which has a RESTful API for accessing data about state legislators, bills, votes, etc.
• Project Vote Smart, which has an API with congressional addresses, etc.
• Follow The Money, whose API reveals campaign contribution data for state officials.
• TransparencyData API (campaign contributions only)

You’ll need to grab API keys for each service you want use. If you’re running Rails, GovKit includes a handy generator for creating an initializer to hold your config info in config/initializers/govkit.rb:

rails generate govkit

[Source on GitHub]