Starting today, the Party Time website will include a new feature: this spot where you can download all the underlying, raw data that form the basis for this website.

Already you can do a lot of sleuthing through right here at Party Time. For example, you can find all the events mentioning golf, or beer, or ice cream. Or you can find all the parties featuring House Speaker Nancy Pelosi fundraising for others or House Minority Leader John Boehner doing the same for his colleagues. You can check out our handy dandy calendar. But if raw data is more your style, so you can grab it, mash it, and make something new, this is the spot to get it.

With the Center for Responsive Politics’ announcement today that that venerable institution is unleashing all of its own data, going open source with its campaign finance, lobbying, 527, and personal finance data, there’s a treasure trove of possibilities. What about matching up when candidates report their contributions with the timing of party events? How about mooshing it with new data on the first quarter of 2009 as it soon becomes available from the Federal Election Commission? Certainly there must be many fun ways to visualize this party data that we haven’t tried yet at the Sunlight Foundation.

As always, we must make a few caveats about our Party Time data. 1. We only know about the parties we know about. We collect our invitations from anonymous lobbyist sources. Because there’s no formal reporting requirement for these parties, there’s no way to know what proportion of parties we capture. However, we’ve got records here for more than 3,500 events. To our knowledge, that’s the most comprehensive resource of these events ever created. 2. We attempt to delete duplicates, but we may not catch them all. Our busy army of Party Time interns work hard to delete duplicate entries for the same party. (We often get multiple invitations for the same event.) However, there’s a few some may slip through, so it’s always worth double checking if you are attempting to do something like figure out which lawmaker has hosted the most parties. 3. We post the invitations as we get them. All the records in this database link back to the actual source invitations on this website. We don’t confirm the accuracy of what is listed in these invitations or whether these events actually occurred as planned.

All that said, dig in! And please keep us posted on what you do and find.

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