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.

Metavid is a community legislative video archive project. Its principal participants are Michael Dale, Abram Stern and professor Warren Sack. It was initially a thesis project at university of Santa Cruz CA, and was then funded by sunlight foundation for a year.

The metavid project is working to change the world on a few fronts:
Metavid makes legislative video more accessible so people can keep tabs on their representatives. We capture the full days proceedings and make full stream url accessible/embeddable/downloadable. This brings primary source legislative video footage into online political dialog. This should change the world by democratizing and opening up who decides what legislative video material is relevant. (in contrast to a broadcast model where only cable news corporations have access to private legislative video archives) For a detailed version of the above argument see my thesis paper ;)
All the footage is also made searchable from the text transcripts, who is on the screen and soon will be searchable by other temporal semantic properties (ie: bill debate:=bill name)

MetaVidWiki is open source software based on the same software that runs Wikipedia. This means communities can point metavid at their own dataset and be in full control of the reception of their message. This will change the world by enabling NGOs and tech collectives to take control over the reception of their message. We have not officially launched metavid yet but we already have a few interested parties and at least one full deployment.
MetaVidWiki uses open source video format ogg theora and has developed tools to make it easier to use free and open formats. This ensures video is accessible in free software platforms and ensures there are no patent licensing fees or corporate taxes on audio visual communication. Also see a blog post on why free/open video should be a standard: here