Open Congress
February 26th, 2007Oh, this is so very cool.
"OpenCongress brings together, for the first time in one place, all the best data on what’s really happening in Congress:
- 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.
….
Each page on OpenCongress provides access to the full official details of a bill: the text of the bill itself, its status in Congress, its voting results. At the same time, each page allows you to see the "big picture" behind a bill: recent news analyses of it, what its buzz is on blogs, what industries gave campaign contributions to its sponsors. News coverage and blog commentary are vital to understanding the Congressional process and help to translate the highly technical language of bills into something more intelligible. Future versions of OpenCongress will introduce more new features in this regard, as well as more ways to collaboratively analyze legislation and engage with Congress.
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."
Wowza! I’m sending this to my clients. Law librarians, show this off in your office. I might have more to say about this once I play around with it a bit. I’m not thrilled that they are only using Google News (Y! and Topix make for a great addition to Google) Also, it looks like the site is having major "502 Bad Gateway" issues right now. Still, I’m in love with the concept. Fingers crossed that this improves. (via)
