Summary
After a bill has been passed through both the house and senate, there is a "Conference Committee" assembled of ~3 members of each body to reconcile the differences between the two bills. In the last 6 months of the session, most of the relevant work being done by the legislature is in these "Conference Committees", so we should include their members in the CC list we use on submitting testimony (currently, the user's legislators and the regular committee chairs).
Conference committees are different from regular committees, and so are not available through the MA Legislature API, but we believe the membership is publicly accessible somewhere (TBD).
Example of a Conference Committee hearing (notably, it doesn't directly link to the bill in question): https://malegislature.gov/Events/Hearings/Detail/5752 - if we can't find an easy list, maybe we can scan the existing hearing event descriptions for the phrase "conference committee" to try and pull together a rule for finding these.
If there is not an easy way to scrape these programmatically, a one-off process to get these in place for the current legislative session would still be valuable.
Success Criteria
Summary
After a bill has been passed through both the house and senate, there is a "Conference Committee" assembled of ~3 members of each body to reconcile the differences between the two bills. In the last 6 months of the session, most of the relevant work being done by the legislature is in these "Conference Committees", so we should include their members in the CC list we use on submitting testimony (currently, the user's legislators and the regular committee chairs).
Conference committees are different from regular committees, and so are not available through the MA Legislature API, but we believe the membership is publicly accessible somewhere (TBD).
Example of a Conference Committee hearing (notably, it doesn't directly link to the bill in question): https://malegislature.gov/Events/Hearings/Detail/5752 - if we can't find an easy list, maybe we can scan the existing hearing event descriptions for the phrase "conference committee" to try and pull together a rule for finding these.
If there is not an easy way to scrape these programmatically, a one-off process to get these in place for the current legislative session would still be valuable.
Success Criteria
generalCourts/194/billscollection)