"Make Congress more transparent and encourage civic engagement"

February 27, 2007 10:55 PM

OpenCongress.orgis a site that aggregates data about the United States Senate and House. Keep track of your senators or representatives through rss feeds, read bills on topics that are important to you, and find out what industries are behind the scenes providing money to your politicians in Washington among many other uses of this new resource.
posted by rfbjames (18 comments total)

As a political junkie, I love things like this... Thanks!
posted by amyms at 11:10 PM on February 27, 2007

Bad Gateway

The proxy server received an invalid response from an upstream server.

Too bad, I would like to keep track of my Congresspersons.
posted by Cranberry at 11:42 PM on February 27, 2007

Works for me. I like keeping track of everybody else's congresscritters. The only scary thing about the Maine senators right now is they've already endorsed McCain's bid for the republican nomination.
posted by SteveInMaine at 3:31 AM on February 28, 2007

This is pretty cool, I volunteered a lot of time this summer campaigning for the candidate who is now my congressperson; this will make it easy to keep track of how well he's keeping up with his promises. Or how badly.
posted by octothorpe at 3:45 AM on February 28, 2007

Though it's a little less Web 2.0, see also the Washington Post's Congress votes database by MeFi's own adrian_h.
posted by heydanno at 5:40 AM on February 28, 2007

see also the Washington Post's Congress votes database by MeFi's own adrian_h

...and thescoop.
posted by MrMoonPie at 5:53 AM on February 28, 2007

...and simonw, I believe.
posted by Aloysius Bear at 6:06 AM on February 28, 2007

Most definitely best of the web. This is what the Internet is all about, open democracy. I'm surprised it took this long. Hopefully this will lead to an application of "wisdom of the crowds" so we have a real-time proxy vote system to rate politicians and actions.
posted by stbalbach at 6:06 AM on February 28, 2007

Oh how cute, they even have the necessary Web 2.0 "beta" sticker.
posted by taursir at 6:19 AM on February 28, 2007 [1 favorite]

Very nice layout and a well designed site. I like the feature where you can see which member of the other party a Congressman votes most similarly to. It's definitely going into my favorites.
posted by elkelk at 6:23 AM on February 28, 2007

This is really neat. What I'd really like to be able to do is customize the homepage (myOpenCongress.org, or something) to feature my congresspeople, and the bills and issues I am interested in.
posted by Rock Steady at 6:31 AM on February 28, 2007

Previous discussion of the Post's database.
posted by kirkaracha at 6:38 AM on February 28, 2007

looking at the latest bills being discussed by the house, I'm glad to know that their most pressing subject is the naming of post offices.
posted by localhuman at 7:49 AM on February 28, 2007

This is why I read Metafilter. Thanks.
posted by recurve at 8:01 AM on February 28, 2007

Extreme utmost most-mondo wicked awesome-cool.
posted by JHarris at 9:52 AM on February 28, 2007

See also, this MeFi project from several weeks ago which does the same thing for Virginia government.
posted by Partial Law at 10:59 AM on February 28, 2007

Too true, taursir, too true.

Partial Law, speaking of Richmond Sunlight, you should check out The Sunlight Foundation.
posted by shoepal at 9:57 PM on February 28, 2007

Thank you for posting this, really. This is something I've wanted to see ever since I heard about TheyWorkForYou.com. I wondered why there wasn't a version for the U.S., and I wanted desperately for there to be one. It seemed like such a simple but brilliant idea. I felt the U.S. needed one, to the point where I wanted to make one myself. However, I knew nothing about making websites and coordinating databases, nor did I know anyone that knew anything about said things, so I'm really glad to see that other people thought it was a good thing, too.

I'm really glad to know this exists. It's a little disappointing to see this post has so few favorites, and so few comments, though.
posted by wander at 12:25 PM on March 2, 2007