3/6/2025: We at Ship Creek Group took Will Muldoons/the AK Leg site and pulled it into https://github.com/ShipCreekGroup/alaska-legislative-data. See that GitHub repo for info on how to get cleaned bulk data, code to do the scraping yourself, or file an issue if you have questions or need help. Thank you Will and other previous contributors for your work on this!

8/4/2024: Note from Will Muldoon: I borrowed this page from www.akleg.gov/Apptester.html and made some modifications:

It can send GET requests and display their output. I modified the page to be able to automagically save JSON returns with structured filenames. PLEASE read the PDF below for an idea on the data structures and allowable queries. If you stick to V1.4 and JSON headers, incorrect queries should timeout or fail. On V1.2 and V1.0, You CAN overwhelm the server and bring down BASIS and the akleg.gov website. You can also flood the server and bring it down if you try to run several queries at once. This page is designed for running and saving one query at a time.

If you have any questions on writing queries or getting large sets without worrying about breaking things, please reach out. You can drag and drop JSON files into Tableau to convert them into tables if you aren't good at parsing JSON returns or processing data at this scale. With the JSON returns, as long as you are querying the same thing, but getting different items (Votes from members X and Y, or Bills from Session N and N+1), you can "Union" them and view them as a unified set in Tableau Public. Microsoft Power BI has the ability to "join" along with being able to union, which is probably more familiar for SQL/CSV nerds.

I'll be putting together How-To's on stuff I did (calculating votes, bills by subject/sponsor, joining all of this into something coherent) over the coming months. I'll try and help when possible on specific asks, but it isn't a high priority of mine. -Wm.

4/25/2019: New Update: isactive=true is now a contraint for members to remove retired members

4/25/2019: New Update: Header Version 1.4 the structure of JSON objects have been simplified by serializing directly from .NET data objects.

1/6/2021: New Update: Meeting queries that include a date constraint (either date=;startdate= or enddate=), will calcluate the session paramater setting from the date, which allows meeting queries across bienniums, but also eases the problem of querying meetings in early january (is a meeting on Jan 8th 2021 going to be found in the 31st or the 32nd?). Let the service save you the trouble. Session paramater is still required to be set.