The U.S. Congress produces thousands of bills every year -- so it’s difficult to figure out which are significant, and which aren’t so much. Some data is available on official government websites, but usually without real-world context for determining which bills affect the things you care about. Non-profit organizations and issue-based groups could use more helpful ways to follow their interests in Congress.

OpenCongress.org is a free and open-source public resource that combines official government data with news and blog coverage about Congress. Recently, we launched a set of new features for tracking and sharing the best info about bills, issues, and Members. But this is just the start of how social data on “My OpenCongress” can bring you closer to what’s really happening in Congress.

New data mashups on “My OpenCongress” will allow users to customize the stream of info they receive about their tracked items. In other words, it can be a lot easier to separate the signal from the noise on Capitol Hill-- to figure out what bills and votes are important or meaningful to you. Users will have access to a wider variety of content, more streams of helpfully-curated data about their interests, and more social wisdom from around the web.

Here’s an example of how these mashups would work: a user reads about a bill of interest, and adds it to her “My OpenCongress” profile as a tracked item. On her page of Tracked Bills (view sample), she would then be able to choose from a few simple options for how much info to display for that bill: every news article and blog post that mentions it, or just those rated highly from different data sources, or blends of the various options.

Adding this social data would enhance the value of peer-to-peer communication throughout the site and make "My OpenCongress" a more useful public resource (register or login). These mashups can serve as tools for greater government transparency, combating the influence of corruption, and opening up our democratic process.

How many Americans can get their U.S. Senator on the line? Whose call does your Congressman take: yours or the deep-pocketed lobbyist’s or campaign contributor? Democracy suffers when citizens have little meaningful access to or influence over elected officials or a news media focused more on the ‘boxing match’ than issues relevant to citizens’ lives.

With Capitol News Connection's interactive Ask Your Lawmaker website (www.askyourlawmaker.org) and customizable content-rich widgets, anyone with an Internet connection or a cell phone can hold power to account on the issues that matter where they live and work. Ask Your Lawmaker gives citizens a powerful voice: It is our experience that asking questions can help shape policy and the news agenda. Bad stuff happens when no one is watching, and our elected representatives need to know citizens are watching them – closely.  Ask Your Lawmaker utilizes the interactivity, customizability and viral nature of the Web to connect citizens both to each other and to their Congressional lawmakers. It raises the level of discourse and debate and shines the light of transparency on the political process.

By adding a variety of mobile services and applications, AYL plans to extend its reach beyond the Internet so that people can participate any time, any place, and away from their desktops or laptops. Whether submitting a question via SMS, finding out who your Congress person is via GPS or a street address, mapping a question, recording audio of your question on an iPhone, listening, sharing or ‘truth-squading’ an answer, CNC's proposed suite of mobile solutions will make lawmaker's ears as accessible as the phone in your pocket.

The plan is to start simple with SMS. By allowing users to pair their cell phone number with their AYL user account they will be able to: send question to ‘All U.S. Congress’ and individual lawmakers, receive notifications when their questions have been answered, and share answers with their friends – all using text messaging.

A more advanced application will also be developed for different smart phone platforms (BlackBerry, iPhone, Android, Windows Mobile). These more feature-rich applications will replicate the existing functionality of the widget. It will allow users to toggle between questions and answers, ask and vote on questions, read and listen to answers, comment and share answers and ask follow up questions. It will also feature the same customization options offered by the widget, allowing users to configure by topic (Climate Change Qs&As, Bailout Qs&As), location (California Qs&As), individual lawmaker (Speaker Pelosi’s Qs&As) and by user ID (“My Qs&As).  Additionally, new functionality will let users figure out who their lawmaker is (GPS or street address), submit questions, share content with friends, ‘truth squad’ answers and collaborate around new questions.

Ultimately – and we recognize this a year or two down the line, but ultimately – we plan to develop more sophisticated applications that turn mobile devices into multimedia, multiplatform reporting or newsgathering devices. With such a technology, users could submit audio and video of their own questions directly to the system, as well as a lawmaker’s answer gathered by citizen ‘super users’ when lawmakers are home in their districts. Using the same technology, CNC reporters would be able to get an answer to the question using the same technology and post the answer with audio and video back to the website and the user’s phone. We understand this requires some heavy lifting (video capable cell phones, higher capacity networks, and reliable speech to text conversion) but by looking ahead of the curve and anticipating needs we hope to successfully fundraise and deliver cutting edge solutions.

WHAT: Vote Report India is a collaborative platform to enable Indian citizens to track election irregularities and monitor the performance of elected officials at national, state and local levels.

Users contribute direct SMS, email, Twitter and web reports and the Ushahidi-based platform aggregates them on an interactive map, and distributes them via RSS and email/ SMS alerts.

WHO: Vote Report India is a non-partisan all-volunteer collaboration between software developers, designers, academics, and other professionals to bring transparency to the Indian political process.

Vote Report India is built on the Ushahidi and Swift platforms and managed by eMoksha, a non-profit organization that aims to enable stronger democracies through increased citizen awareness and engagement.

WHY: With more than 700 million voters, India is the world's largest democracy. However, it is far from being an ideal democracy.

The same controversies surround every election in India: the illegal use of government resources for campaigning, incidences of divisive and inflammatory rhetoric in campaign speeches, populist promises that are impossible to fulfill, allegations of violence and intimidation against voters, incomplete voter lists and malfunctioning voting machines. Even more seriously, more than 1000 candidates contesting in the 2009 Lok Sabha elections, or 15-20% of the total number of candidates, had criminal background. To make matters worse, the urban middle class complains about corrupt politicians, but doesn't step out to contest elections or to even cast its vote.

So, Vote Report India aims to do two things at the same time: build civic engagement amongst India's youth and increase transparency and accountability in the Indian political process. 

One way to do it is to crowd-source the monitoring of the political process in India. Given that there are more than 400 million mobile users in India, compared to 50 million internet users, SMS becomes an integral part of this crowdsourcing process.

The Ushahidi platform allows Vote Report India to have a large reach via SMS and provide a rich interactive experience to web users at the same time.  

WHERE: Vote Report India aims to increase transparency in the Indian political process at national, state and local levels.

WHEN: Vote Report India was started in April 2009 to track election irregularities in the 2009 Indian Lok Sabha elections. Going forward, Vote Report India will create micro-sites to enable Indian citizens to track election irregularities for all upcoming national, state and local elections. Vote Report India will also enable Indian citizens to monitor the performance of elected officials at national, state and local levels on a regular basis.

EXPECTED IMPACT: By crowd-sourcing the monitoring of the political process in India, Vote Report India aims to build civic engagement amongst India's youth and increase transparency and accountability in the Indian political process.

FIT WITH UN MILLENIAL DEVELOPMENT GOALS: As a collaboration between stakeholders spread across three continents -- eMoksha (India), Ushahidi (Kenya) and Swift (United States) -- Vote Report India is a good example of Goal 8 of the United Nations Millennium Development Goals: develop  a global partnership for development.

Writers have always written, not knowing about who or where their readers are. This mashup will show where the readers are coming from, who read a writer's article, or where the readers come from, who care about the same topics as any tag in the system.

We will use zip codes, which we have on record, for our members, or IP address, for non-registered visitors, to map where readers of a specific article come from. Since articles are also tagged, we can pull tag contact data for people as well, and map tags based on who's visited from where-- for any article.

When writers know more about where their readers come from, that could/will change the way they think about their readers and could change how they write.

This could have a powerful effect upon editorial decisions too. Since thousands of tags will be easily checked for how they "map", it will be possible to asses reach of the site and editorial policy in new ways.

Writing, news, Op-eds, the media-- they are essential elements of democracy. Understanding which aspects of the writing are reaching WHERE, for each article, or groups of articles, or by the author-- all of these should be easily pulled together using the system we've already built for managing content. Even on more local levels, if we can tap the power of google analytics to pull IP info and map it to local, county or state levels, this could be powerful, since we also tag our content by locale. For example, if a writer writing on water pollution discovers that the lower part of a county is seeing the articles, but not the upper level, and a river runs through the county, that could easily help the writer identify where further outreach is needed.