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Farewell OpenCongress, hello GovTrack
The news just hit the street that Sunlight Foundation’s OpenCongress will be retired on March 1. OpenCongress has been a valuable tool for Congressional information seekers since 2007. But this news is actually a good thing. OpenCongress will now point users to GovTrack.us which also has a long history of valuable information service. And what’s more, some of the best pieces of OpenCongress will be absorbed into GovTrack to make it better going forward. As Sunlight says, this is a win, win for everyone. Thanks Sunlight for 10 years of great civic tech and more going forward!
Some key differences exist between GovTrack and OpenCongress, though, and we wanted to make sure civil society didn’t lose functionality when we retired this site. In particular, OpenCongress includes the ability to contact congressional members through Sunlight’s completely redesigned and revamped Email Congress, a service that relies on the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s javascript driver, because collaboration = awesome. As well as being available at the brand new EmailCongress.us, GovTrack is now incorporating the Email Congress service into its own site. And users can now access GovTrack’s excellent data and strong analytics as well as Email Congress in one spot. Win, win.
Sunlight releases Scout to help track legislative/regulatory process
Today, our pals at the Sunlight Foundation released Scout, a new tool that allows you to create customized keyword alerts to notify you whenever issues you care about are included in legislative or regulatory actions — at both the state and federal level! They’ll also soon release their Open States tool to target the legislative process of all 50 states.
Thanks Sunlight!
Start by entering a keyword or phrase you would like to get updates about, such as the vaguely defined “cyber threat” included in CISPA or any references to the “Digital Millennium Copyright Act.” Scout then saves your subscriptions and sends notifications via email or text message whenever the subscribed issue or bill is talked about on the floor of Congress, mentioned in new regulations, appears in state and federal legislation or when Congress is moving forward for a vote. Through your profile you can create as many alerts as you’d like and group them by tags with the additional option to make them public for others to follow your issues. You can also complement a Scout subscription by adding optional external RSS feeds, such as press releases from a member of Congress or an issue-based blog.
[HT to BoingBoing!]
Govtrack’s new crystall ball … er … Docket page
Our pal Josh Tauberer at Govtrack.us wrote recently that he’s started a new Docket page on which readers can now know up to a week ahead when a bill is scheduled to come to the floor of the House or Senate. He was able to cobble together the data needed to do this because of the freely available — and new — House website called docs.house.gov and Senate.gov where the Senate’s floor for the next day is published. And don’t forget to follow govtrack for tweets on the upcoming bills. Way to use structured, open government data, Josh!!
Head-to-Head Vote Comparison
OpenCongress.org has released a new tool that allows you to compare the voting records of any two senators or representatives during the current 110th session of Congress!
- Compare the Voting Records of Any Two Members of Congress October 31, 2008, announcement by Donny Shaw
- Head-to-Head Vote Comparison tool
- Example: compare Senators Barack Obama and John McCain
- OpenCongress.org Does Voting Comparisons, November 3rd, 2008, Comment by John Wonderlich, The Open House Project. “Several elements of well-coordinated data have been combined to produce something much more useful than the sum of its parts.”
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