Meet “OpenCongress‘ (www.opencongress.org), a free, open-source, non-profit, non-partisian resource for what goes on inside both the House of Representatives and the Senate. Created by a conglomeration of the Sunlight Foundation and PPF, OpenCongress is, in it’s basic form, an extention of Thomas (the official website of the Library of Congress) and GovTrack.us, a site that tracks bills, votes, committees, etc. This extention allows the average joe, from any computer with internet access, to get critical information about legislation currently going through the political process, bios on Congressmen and women, and blog and news links about what’s going on in Congress. Certainly a powerful tool…
I’d like to take an excerpt from the About OpenCongress page on “Why It Matters“:
“The inaccessibility of Congressional information contributes to the widespread perception that the Congressional process is the realm of a privileged few, or worse, is irrelevant to our everyday lives…Now we have the web tools to open up the Congressional process to effective public scrutiny…OpenCongress offers a step forward by harnessing the wide-ranging body of social wisdom about Congress that is available in online news articles and blog posts. By placing the voices of journalists and bloggers directly alongside official Congressional information, OpenCongress seeks to contextualize and demystify Congress as a whole.”
It’s no secret that the law-making process is both confusing and uninteresting to the casual voter, the casual observer; the people who really matter. As someone just preparing to leave High School, I’m sure I don’t have near the disillusionment towards the political process. Thankfully, Sunlight and PPF put their heads together and came up with a way to create a dashboard/repository of useful stuff that any citizen can come read and understand, and with some excellent features.
Features like links to blogs about politics thanks to Technorati and Google Blog Search, related news stories from Google News, and links to each member of Congress on Congresspedia, another of Sunlight Foundation’s children. Another thing; I know we trumpet “Open-Source” around here at PaulTech like it’s the gadget world’s Second Coming, but OpenCongress implements this excellently: They are constantly giving opportunities to improve the site to anyone that is able to help. Why, I could even go get the code used to compile OpenCongress, which is no more than one link off their main page and make my own modifications, if I felt so compelled.
Most importantly, this is a great opportunity for more than just us tech-saavy to help change things. In the same way that occurs when I’m trying to explain the inner workings of computers to my not-so-saavy friends, legislation that affects our daily lives can be just as confusing and befuddling. Now, while it’s only in beta, OpenCongress has presented a way to read exactally what is being handled by your elected representatives and how each of them are voting. At the very least, even if you don’t understand what you’re reading, links to related blogs and news stories are available so that contemporary observers can offer their interpretations and viewpoints on the whole subject.
At PaulTech, our motto is “Technology is Power”, and we think that OpenCongress is one of the slickest ways we’ve seen to get people in the know about what affects them. Go check it out; even if you can’t stand politics in the least, trust me, you’ll have helped yourself and maybe even other people.
This is very useful. I used “Open Congess” to find information about my latest hot button, solar energy. Prior to this post I was wondering where to find information. Now I know, and it took me about 5 minutes to find out they are not doing much, which is what they do most of the time anyway. Good post
Cameron