Recently, OpenCongress, a joint project of The Participatory Politics Foundation and the Sunlight Foundation announced a new and improved way of contacting your Members of Congress.

Open Congress version 3 is a new, free & open-source public resource website that helps both groups and individuals email their members of Congress from one webpage while tracking and sharing their correspondence. Two of the most engaging tools of OpenCongress version 3 are:

1. Contact Congress: which lets you write a letter to all three of your members of Congress and send it to their email addresses. It also enables you to track responses, and share your letter with the OpenCongress community and your social media followers.

2. My OC Groups: which is an open-source social network, provides members with the tools to share their position on an issue and work together on watchdogging, educating and organizing actions directed at Congress. My OC Groups can be used by both organizations and individuals.

My OC Groups can help you connect with established organizations and groups that are already working on the same issues that you are interested in. For instance, as I am interested in government transparency, I searched using keywords such as “transparency” and then joined the Sunlight Foundation OpenCongress Group (which you too can join). So now, together as a group, we can illustrate our position regarding a specific bill in Congress.

What is most empowering, however, is that as an individual, you can be a lead organizer by starting your own group and finding others like you to rally behind a common interest. In essence, it gives you the perfect resources to self organize!

If you’ve been following the debt ceiling debate and the recent creation of a “Super Committee” in Congress, you’ll know that this is the perfect time to contact our representatives to demand a more open and accountable government. So I wrote to my representatives -- here’s how:

First I chose S.365  - The Budget Control Act of 2011 - as the bill I was interested in. The S. 365 is the debt ceiling negotiations bill which aside from increasing the debt ceiling, also required the creation of a Joint Select Committee now known as the “SuperCommittee”. Then I tracked it (one has the option to either support, oppose or track any bill).

After deciding whether you want to support, oppose or simply track a bill, the next step is to fill in your contact information (the letter can not be sent without all required information).

I used the message builder (which is great to use because it contains detailed information about the bill -- including last action taken on the bill, committee assigned to it, the highest rated articles on it and most commented sections of the bill). In my letter, I also asked my Members of Congress to make sure that transparency is observed during the joint committee’s meetings including disclosure of all powerful interests connected to any Committee member.

Lastly, I got a message that all three of my Members of Congress have been emailed and was given the option of sharing my correspondence via social media.

You might notice below I got an error message for two of my representatives. This is happening in a small minority of cases (unfortunately, those include my district). It generally means that a Member’s webform isn’t configured properly in the OpenCongress “Formaggedon” module or that their .gov website has changed, but the bugs are being rapidly worked out.

If you notice other kinks while using the tool, please shoot us a note in the comments section.

Check this out to see what else OpenCongress can do for you and/or your organization including providing you with new widgets, Facebook Connect and API enhancements.

Note: It is advisable to check your account settings to “public” in order for other users to connect with you.

We hope you’ll join us in not just using Open Congress v.3 but also to let Congress know we need the new “Super Congress” to be open and transparent. Please join us! And feel free to leave your thoughts or impressions on the new tools in the comments.

Residents of Minnesota now have a new way to keep track of what’s happening in their state with the launch of OpenGovernment Minnesota. The “land of 10,000 lakes” is the latest state added to OpenGovernment, a joint project of the Sunlight Foundation and the Participatory Politics Foundation, along with support from the Minnesota Historical Society.*

Visit MN.opengovernment.org to get the real story behind what's happening in government across the state via official government information, local news coverage, blog posts and social media alerts.

Writes David Moore on the OpenGovernment blog:

Now folks in Minnesota can track with ease everything their state legislature does — all the bills that are proposed, votes that are taken, money that was raised, and more. We’ve timed the launch of this, the sixth U.S. state on OpenGovernment, to coincide with the Netroots Nation conference ongoing this weekend in Minneapolis / St. Paul. We’re pleased to share this new public resource for accountability in government and citizen watchdogging with all the political bloggers & issue-based activists there.

The Sunlight Labs Open States project developed the legislative backend for OpenGovernment. Supported in part by the work of volunteers, the Open States project’s goal is to collect and scrape legislative data from all 50 state legislatures and make it available online in a unified, developer-friendly format.

* Update: Additional support from the Library of Congress National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program.

 

Keeping track of local government just got easier with today's beta launch of OpenGovernment.org, a joint project of the Sunlight Foundation and the Participatory Politics Foundation. The project is a free, open-source web application that allows users to dig into local, city and state level government with unparalleled transparency. This inaugural launch debuts with data from five state legislatures: California, Louisiana, Maryland, Texas and Wisconsin. Residents in these five states can now easily watchdog their state legislators through an online portal of public information. An engaged community is key to creating greater awareness on the importance of transparency in state and local government and infusing greater trust in our elected officials.

OpenGovernment.org will serve as a hub of local government information in a similar manner to its popular sibling that deals with the federal level, OpenCongress.org. The project pulls together official announcements, news coverage, blog posts, social media alerts and more to give a truly illustrative picture of local government. OpenGovernment.org also makes it easy for citizens to self-organize around issues they care being debated by state legislatures and contact their elected officials directly from bill pages. The Sunlight Labs Open States project built the legislative backend for the project with support from volunteer contributions. The Open States project collects and scrapes legislative data from all 50 state legislatures and makes it available in a unified, developer-friendly format.

As you check out this exciting new project, be sure to heed the words of David Moore, the executive director of the Participatory Politics Foundation:

This is indeed a beta version of the site, so keep in mind that we expect there to be a few kinks, and much more data & features are forthcoming. In that context, our small non-profit development team is incredibly excited to get this new project out onto the open Web and in front of people — we’ve been working on it for three-fourths of the past year in partnership with Sunlight, and we’re excited to roll it out to all 50 states and to foster a diverse (in terms of skills, time, and other) community of volunteer developers around it to remix it. There are a lot of factors involved here that really motivate us: fighting systemic corruption, liberating public data, advocating comprehensive electoral reform, facilitating peer-to-peer communication about our government, empowering citizen watchdogs — but one of the primary ones is creating user-friendly interfaces for this baffling and arcane world of legislative data.

More data and additional states and cities will be added as they become available. Please test it out and let us know what you think!

Here are some of the more interesting media mentions of Sunlight and our friends and allies over the past week:

Jonathan D. Salant and Lizzie O’Leary with Bloomberg.com have an article showing how there are six lobbyists attempting to influence the health care reform debate for each of the 535 members of the House and Senate. That figure is three times the number of lobbyists registered to lobby on defense. They used data from the Center for Responsive Politics to illustrate how every one of the 10 biggest lobbying firms by revenue is attempting to influence the debate on behalf of some interest or another, spending $263.4 million on lobbying during the first six months of 2009 alone. They quote Bill Allison, Sunlight's senior fellow, “Whenever you have a big piece of legislation like this, it’s like ringing the dinner bell for K Street.” Multiple other outlets picked up the article and Bill's quote, including Kate Barrett at ABC News. And David Schechter, CNN's senior national editor, wrote a column about the lobbying feeding frenzy surrounding the health care reform debate. He lists Sunlight and OpenSecrets.org as good sources for information on the "lobbying largesse."

In light of the increasingly heated debate over how to reform health care policy, Lisa Stone at BlogHer wrote about the new partnership between BlogHer and OpenCongress, the joint project between the Participatory Politics Foundation and Sunlight, to provide a forum to move the discourse in a more civil and positive direction. They have asked Nancy Watzman, Sunlight's director of the Party Time project, to share her investigations on their site multiple times a week. Be sure to check their coverage out, which starts today.

Writing at Forbes, Tim O'Reilly, founder and CEO of O'Reilly Media, wrote about what he calls the promise of innovation provided by Government 2.0. And he asked, "How does government itself become an open platform that allows people inside and outside government to innovate?" O'Reilly points to the Apps for America contests as an example of the "virtuous circle of citizen innovation" using the information made available through the White House's Data.gov. PC World published a piece by Grant Gross with IDB News Service on how the contest is asking developer to use the raw data released on Data.gov and elsewhere to demonstrate the power of data-publishing and number-crunching services. Gross discussed with Clay Johnson, Sunlight Labs' director, about how the Labs works to assist traditional and citizen journalists with investigative reporting. "As the Obama administration begins to release more data, there aren't enough fingers on keyboards here in Sunlight Labs to handle all this," Clay said. "Has the Obama administration succeeded in making more government data available? You're talking to the guy with the most unquenchable thirst for that, who will never say that they're successful."

The Boston Globe's "Political Notebook" column makes note of two of Sunlight's closest friends, Taxpayers for Common Sense and the Center for Responsive Politics, teaming up to create a database showing campaign cash to congressional lawmakers and the earmarks that they requested. Taxpayers is providing the data showing more than 20,000 earmarks totaling more than $35 billion. And CRP has detailed $227 million in campaign donations and lobbying expenses. The article quotes Ryan Alexander, Taxpayer's president, “Earmarks and campaign contributions are part and parcel of the pay-to-play system that permeates Washington...Companies making thousands of dollars in campaign contributions get millions of earmarked taxpayer dollars from lawmakers." The database can be searched here.

Speaking of earmarks, Greenwire's Anne C. Mulkern wrote about how lawmakers, while crafting legislation meant to finance the Department of Energy, inserted $75.2 million in earmarks for research at schools and universities in their home states and districts. Mulkern quotes Steve Ellis, vice president of Taxpayers for Common Sense, questioning the use of earmarks to fund research. "The gold standard in academic research is peer-reviewed analysis," Ellis said. "Picking the winners and losers based on geography and not who has conducted the best research is a recipe for wasting precious taxpayer dollars."  The New York Times republished Mulkern's article.

FederalNewsRadio's Max Cacas reported on the Project on Government Oversight's (POGO) new guide, "The Art of Congressional Oversight: A Users Guide to Doing it Right." The 83-page volume contains insights into how to be a successful congressional committee investigator, Cacas writes. POGO put on paper what they've been teaching over the past three years via monthly training sessions, free lunchtime skill-building seminars designed to educate Hill staffers about their rights, responsibilities and powers working in the realm of congressional oversight. The trainings and book are part of POGO's effort to teach congressional staffers about the constitutionally-mandated jobs of Congress -- providing oversight over the cabinet-level agencies and other organizations within the executive branch.

Special note: As National Journal's "Hotline On Call" pointed out on their list of upcoming weekend public policy programming, Ellen Miller, Sunlight's executive director, will be appearing on C-SPAN's "Communicators" program Saturday evening at 6:30 p.m. (EST).

The folks at OpenCongress, a Sunlight joint project with Participatory Politics Foundation, are making great strides at building the place to go to find the exact information about every bill, issue, person, and vote in Congress. They already run circles around any other site, including Thomas, the Library of Congress site, in terms of ease of use and content.

Earlier today, OpenCongress announced the addition of 13 new features (this team is amazingly prolific!) and a site redesign giving you more information about bills, their sponsors, and other ways for individuals to track their interests in Congress. Many of the changes and additions came from your ideas. We're really trying to respond too how you want to use the site. Some of the new features OpenCongress is most excited about are the ones involving input from users, such as the rating of the "most useful" news articles, blog posts, and user comments. The idea is for users to help "filter up" the best information on the Web about what Congress is up to.

Be sure to check it out.