Open Congress - Keep tabs on your congress critter

Filed under: Internet, Features, Blogging, Open Source, Social Software

Open Congress - Keep tabs on your congress critter

by Dolores Parker Feb 27th 2007

If you are hankering to become a policy wonk and find yourself glued to C-SPAN and all things political, you might be interested in OpenCongress.org, a website with all the tools to launch you into political wonkdom. The site is devoted to bringing transparency to government and features a one stop shop for information on bills, related news articles and blog coverage. It is a free, open source, non-profit, non-partisan project managed jointly by the Sunlight Foundation and the Participatory Politics Foundation.

At the site you have access to Thomas, the website of the Library of Congress, bills, members of Congress, political punditry, votes, and campaign contribution information. And like all bona fide Web 2.0 sites, you can see what issues the majority of readers are most interested in, what bills are the most viewed, what bills are the most reported in news and blogs, etc., all with digg-like ranking buttons. The idea here is to focus public scrutiny on what people care about most and keep everything out in the light.

I went to one of my Member of Congress' site and viewed his votes, an analysis of his votes showed where the majority of his campaign contributions came from (real estate, insurance and finance) and the latest coverage on him from news and blogs. Best of all, there are live feeds to which you can subscribe and get yourself updated when your Member of Congress does anything new. There's even a button to contact your representative so when they do something naughty or nice, you can always be sure to stay in touch.

Tags: congress, non-partisan, non-profit, open source, OpenSource, participatory politics foundation, ParticipatoryPoliticsFoundation, politics, sunlight foundation, SunlightFoundation, web 2.0, Web2.0

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Andrew Hillman, Andrew Hillman said 9:58AM on 2-27-2007

Very Nice now we need one state by state!

airphillips said 10:37AM on 2-27-2007

www.votesmart.org

Non-profit non-partisan group focused on voter education. Provides factual information regarding political canidates backgrounds and voting-records, as well as interest group raitings, public statements, and attitudes on key issues.

National and state legislatures are also tracked for key votes taken and roll-calls are provided.

From the PVS:

Picture this: thousands of citizens (conservative and liberal alike) working together, spending endless hours researching the backgrounds and records of thousands of political candidates and elected officials to discover their voting records, campaign contributions, public statements, biographical data (including their work history) and evaluations of them generated by over 100 competing special interest groups. Every election these volunteers test each candidate's willingness to provide citizens with their positions on the issues they will most likely face if elected through the National Political Awareness Test (NPAT).

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