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.
Comments
My OpenCongress
This is a great way to get information on pending legislastion. I check it every day.
OpenCongress
OpenCongress lives by its name. We need change and they give us the opportunity to do so by looking from the inside. It causes our government to be honest, if that is possible. They know some are lurking and OpenCongress is that window.
I've been using
I've been using OpenCongress.org for several months now and have throughly impressed with the service. Keep up the great work!
Fantasy Congress salutes OpenCongress
Congrats David on the mention. Good to know Daylife has been useful, he has definitely helped out the Fantasy Congress experience.
Keep up the good work guys! We're leaving politics soon, so it's good to know that OpenCongress, GovTrack, and especially Sunlight are keeping the helm.
Support from Daylife Team
Hello Team owners of the OpenCongress Project
I am Vineet Gupta and I am the lead platform engineer for the Daylife APIs (http://developer.daylife.com). I would be excited to support your team with any issues/sample code/quetions/API training that they might need to use the Daylife APIs.
You can reach me at vineet-at-daylife-dot-com
-- Vineet
Hi Vineet, thanks for adding
Hi Vineet, thanks for adding this comment, I'll drop you a line directly, and you can reach me at drm (at) ppolitics dooot org. We're excited about the possibility of partnering w/ Daylife to get straight to the heart of news about Congress (without necessarily needing to dive in to reams and reams of articles).
So good news, just to
So good news, just to confirm, I chatted with Vineet over the phone for a while and we agreed this would be a mutually beneficial use of the Daylife API with a relatively straightforward development path. Vineet generously made himself available to our programming team for questions down the road.
It would indeed be terrifically useful to be able to, say, have easy access to what the Daylife editors are saying about hot bills in the news, such as the most-viewed bill currently on OpenCongress, H.R. 5749, the "Emergency Extended Unemployment Compensation Act of 2008", or Sen. Kennedy. Let's push things forward!
an idea whose time has come
I've been hearing about the Open Congress and Sunlight Foundation projects in the news and online, I've used the resources. My hat is off to these organizations. They deserve plenty of recognition for the obvious idea of - for the first time - making our legialtors accountable (novel), and allowing citizens to actually understand what bills are important, what legislation is worth tracking - and who our legislators are beholden to. Bravo!