This link has been bookmarked by 10 people . It was first bookmarked on 16 Mar 2008, by cdetrio da juggaer.
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OpenCongress brings together official government information with news and blog coverage to give you the real story behind what's happening in Congress.
For most people, finding out what's really happening in Congress is a daunting and time-consuming task. The legislative process is frequently arcane and closed-off from the public, resulting in frustration with Congress and apathy about politics.
Small groups of political insiders and lobbyists know what's really going on in Congress, but this important information rarely makes its way into the light. The official website of the library of Congress, Thomas, publishes the full text of bills, but we can do much more to inform ourselves and make our government accessible. Now, with OpenCongress, everyone can be an insider.
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16 Mar 08
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- Official Congressional information from Thomas, made available by GovTrack.us: bills, votes, committee reports, and more.
- News articles about bills and Members of Congress from Google News.
- Blog posts about bills and Members of Congress from Google Blog Search and Technorati.
- Campaign contribution information for every Member of Congress from the website of the non-profit, non-partisan Center for Responsive Politics, OpenSecrets.org.
- Congress Gossip Blog: a blog written by the site editors of OpenCongress that highlights useful news and blog reporting from around the web. The blog also solicits tips, either anonymous or attributed, from political insiders, citizen journalists, and the public in order to build public knowledge about Congress.
About Open Congress
OpenCongress brings together official government information with news and blog coverage to give you the real story behind what's happening in Congress.
For most people, finding out what's really happening in Congress is a daunting and time-consuming task. The legislative process is frequently arcane and closed-off from the public, resulting in frustration with Congress and apathy about politics.
Small groups of political insiders and lobbyists know what's really going on in Congress, but this important information rarely makes its way into the light. The official website of the library of Congress, Thomas, publishes the full text of bills, but we can do much more to inform ourselves and make our government accessible. Now, with OpenCongress, everyone can be an insider.
OpenCongress is a free, open-source, non-profit, and non-partisan web resource with a mission to help make Congress more transparent and to encourage civic engagement. OpenCongress is a joint project of the Sunlight Foundation and the Participatory Politics Foundation.
OpenCongress brings together, for the first time in one place, all the best data on what's really happening in Congress:
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OpenCongress allows anyone to easily track a bill, a Member of Congress, or an issue area, and to conveniently follow developments in any of those areas by subscribing to its RSS feed. We aim to close the information lag and bring people closer to the Congressional process. Every bill on OpenCongress is also organized by a common issue area, as assigned by the government agency the Congressional Research Service, so you can find bills of interest just by browsing an issue area that matters to you. Along the way, OpenCongress lets you know which bills are the hottest: the most viewed, the most written about in the news, the most buzzed-about on blogs.
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OpenCongress: Separate the Signal from the Noise
In January of 1995, Congress launched Thomas, the online home of the Library of Congress, making available the full text of bills under consideration in Congress. Thomas is a positive starting place for Congressional transparency, and continues to add new features as any website of its kind would. But in its current state, put simply, Thomas is not a user-friendly web resource for a wide audience. The site's presentation of bill information can be difficult to understand, and bills are presented flatly, without any indicators of which ones (say, major appropriations bills) are more significant than others (say, resolutions naming post offices). With tens of thousands of bills and resolutions introduced each session of Congress, it's difficult to separate the signal from the noise and keep your eye on bills that are really important.
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OpenCongress uses Google News to obtain news articles about Congress, and Google Blog Search and Technorati to obtain blog posts about Congress. Thanks to both Google and Technorati for making this sort of open public resource possible. OpenCongress uses these automated services to search the internet widely for relevant search terms to display on OpenCongress pages for bills and Members of Congress. For example, if somewhere on the web someone refers to a bill names (such as "H.R. 1") or the name of a Member of Congress, that page is likely to soon be captured by the automated search function and included on the appropriate page on OpenCongress. While this process is neither immediate nor entirely comprehensive, it amounts to a significant step towards bringing together official Congressional information with the social wisdom and valuable context created by people in news and blog posts. We will be continually refining this process in order to make Open Congress as comprehensive as possible a public resource on every bill and Member of Congress.
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- User Logins: the ability for users to register a username and password with OpenCongress and create user profiles, making it possible for site visitors to contribute their time, writing, and social wisdom to OpenCongress in the ways outlined below.
- Bill Summary: spaces to summarize arcane legislation into plain language, demystifying the process so that everyone can understand how bills work and their implications.
- Collaborative Analysis: spaces and message boards to contribute collective analysis of important legislation. Together we can do more to identify conflicts of interest, wasteful spending, and potential corruption. Also, we can identify instances of praiseworthy legislation and acknowledge when a politician keeps a pledge.
- Bill Tagging: a good way to make the Congressional process more intelligible is to allow people to "tag" bills on OpenCongress, creating folksonomies and providing an easy-to-understand summary of a bill as it's commonly described in the national press. For example, if you're looking for a bill about the internet issue of "net neutrality," OpenCongress will make it possible to find bills that have been tagged by users as such, so that you don't need to know a specific bill name to find the information you're looking for. We'll work to make this tagging work with bookmarking services, such as del.icio.us, so that tagging bills becomes an easy and popular practice for web users.
- Action Calendars: tools to keep track of when important legislation is scheduled for a vote, and to identify the most productive windows of time to contact Congresspeople with your feedback. For example, OpenCongress will make available feeds for iCalendar and other popular calendar applications so that you can be conveniently reminded to contact Congress about issues and bills you care about.
Features Coming Next in Open Congress
This first phase of OpenCongress has focused on bringing together government data, blog and press coverage, and non-profit analysis into a comprehensive snapshot of every congressional bill.
But to truly narrow the gap between what Congressional insiders know and what average citizens know, we need be able to add detail and richness that doesn't come from the public data sources. When people view a bill on OpenCongress, they should be able to see not just the bill details, but also the real story behind the bill. Towards this goal, we'll soon be adding more interactive features to OpenCongress to allow for greater user engagement with the Congressional process:
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About the Participatory Politics Foundation and the Sunlight Foundation
The Participatory Politics Foundation builds software tools and websites that create new opportunities for continual engagement with government. Voting is important, but we have a chance to go further and create a political process that is meritocratic, creative, and participatory. Each day, our lives abound in political feelings and opinions -- not just on Election Day. We believe that the internet presents an unprecedented opportunity to amplify political voices and actions. OpenCongress is a first step towards these goals.
The Sunlight Foundation was founded in January 2006 with the goal of using the revolutionary power of the Internet and new information technology to enable citizens to learn more about what Congress and their elected representatives are doing, and thus help reduce corruption, ensure greater transparency and accountability by government, and foster public trust in the vital institutions of democracy. The Participatory Politics Foundation is thankful for all the trust, ideas, and support that the Sunlight Foundation has given to this project.
OpenCongress is proud to be part of the Sunlight Foundation community. Another partner in this effort is the Open House Project, a working group designed to make recommendations to Congress on ways to begin the process of opening up the House of Representatives and increasing government transparency.
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15 Jan 08
Wytze KoopalOpenCongress brings together official government information with news and blog coverage to give you the real story behind what's happening in Congress. For most people, finding out what's really happening in Congress is a daunting and time-consuming task
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07 Nov 07
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About Open Congress
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