If you've been waiting to see all the standard Web 2.0 site features put to a socially significant use - wait no longer, check out OpenCongress.org. This beautifully designed site makes it far easier and more fun to track activities in the US congress than it's ever been since the organization was formed.
A project of the Participatory Politics Foundation and the Sunlight Foundation, OpenCongress is a site that anyone even remotely interested in politics should see.
OpenCongress makes it easy to track particular bills, topics and congresspeople by RSS, a tracking page or an embeddable widget (see below, for example). A personal account can be created easily with OpenID, there's a perfect amount of AJAX making the site a joy to navigate and all kinds of outside news and data is pulled into the site, rated by users and actively discussed.
The widget above, about a particular bill in congress, is just one of many widgets you can choose from.
I don't usually pay much attention to politics, but within five minutes I built and subscribed to an RSS feed displaying the most recent votes of congresspeople from my area, news stories and blog posts about them and news about a few bills of particular interest to me.
I voted in favor of one bill myself and left a comment on the site about it. There were already a couple of other comments on the same bill and though most of them were worthless - I could hide those ones by turning up the rating criteria on a slider!
This is a really well put-together site that makes me want to pay attention to politics because the user experience is so smooth and compelling.
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What more could OpenCongress offer? There's so much there it's impossible not to ask for more - it really feels like the people behind the site might deliver it! I'd love to see live embedded video of discussions about bills of interest to me and IM alerts when those discussions are about to happen.
Right now the site uses Technorati to bring in blog posts about any bill you're looking at and then users click back to the site to rate the posts they've read. It would be nice to see some AideRSS integration so that we could subscribe to just the most commented on and linked-to posts in that feed.
Finally, I'd like to be able to configure what gets delivered in the feed I subscribe to; an option to opt-out of certain information sources like news stories would probably work best.
See also this cute little widget the Sunlight Foundation launched yesterday, displaying the most used word of the day on the floor of congress. Very interesting! A tag cloud is in the works and at that point it will prove of more actual use. Congress - it's not just for stuffy people any more!
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Thanks for pointing me to these guys, Marshall. I've been wanting something like this for awhile. I went over there and made a couple of widgets about HR6304 and placed them in the high-value upper right of Wordout. Bright, ugly, red widgets which clash beautifully with the various shades of gray I use on the site. They stand out perfectly.
You already know, but I have to mention that the widgets are totally customizable. I could have chosen smoothly soothing colors if I had wanted. But I wanted garish. I wanted them to demand attention. Still, it looks to me like anyone with just a bit of widget experience could style these things any way they wanted.
For me, this post was perfectly timed. Good info about a great site that serves an honorable purpose. Again, thanks.
Posted by: Jon | June 23, 2008 7:21 PM
This could be a significant step towards allowing the mindset and potential of the web to shape the way we interact with social and governmental bodies. I recently heard a talk about democracy being about knowledge management. I wonder if this is the beginning of a more efficient, participatory phase in democratic knowledge management and social interaction?
Posted by: Zach Beauvais | June 24, 2008 2:36 AM
@Zach: I am hoping so. Way back in the 1700s it was impractical for everybody to be present at a debate or vote. With twitter, RSS and a few other things now available, it's possible for a Senator to take America to the floor of the Senate with him.
For instance, if a filibuster demanded constant oration, according to classical rules, I can see the Senator standing there reading tweets from constituents in favor of his actions (till twitter went down...) and then I can see reading blog posts on the Senate floor. I can see that there's now a possibility for the government in the US to actually be Of the people, For the people, and By the people.
Currently I'm trying to get Obama to do this very thing, this week, to defeat the HR6304 bill. I wonder if he realizes what kind of effect that would have on voters from all parties. He would become the golden child of America is he has the guts to even try.
Posted by: Jon | June 24, 2008 3:14 AM
Anyone else try signing in with OpenID yet? Tried, took me to MyOpenID page as it should, typed in password, hit allow, takes me back to the opencongress page saying login failed.
Posted by: Stephen | June 24, 2008 5:43 AM
Now if only someone ported this north of the border for us in Canada. :)
The easier you make it for people to see what they want to know and communicate/act, the more you drive engagement.
Posted by: Melanie Baker | June 24, 2008 6:10 AM
Too bad they don't know the state abbreviation for Virginia is VA (not VI)
http://www.opencongress.org/person/senators
Posted by: Loudacris | June 24, 2008 10:38 AM