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.

Fousquare, a location based application for smart phones, has been growing in popularity at an exponential rate. In 2010 the service grew by 3400% with over 380,000,000 check-ins worldwide. The service uses game mechanics to entice users to check into locations, leave tips, comments and reviews and to find nearby friends.

One of the more useful features on Foursquare is that each location includes a "Tips" section.  When viewing a location, either on the website or through the mobile application, you can see tips -- todos, fun facts, and other brief notes and links -- left by previous visitors. These notes can then be sorted by date or popularity, and also hold great potential as an interesting educational tool. By allowing users and organizations like Sunlight to connect certain facts relevant to politics and politicians with certain locations, Foursquare becomes an innovative way for folks to inform and say informed on transparency issues. Here's how:

As Foursquare becomes more popular, more people will begin to "check into" the offices of politicians and at political hotspots from all over the country. In fact, right now, you can check into the office of Speaker John Bohner. To tap into this tool's educational potential, after you check into Rep. Bohner's office (while visiting), you can easily take a moment to leave a tip on his Foursquare page with information about his biggest donors or related information from his OpenCongress page.

People who check in at his office after you will now have a quick link to review this data before they meet with anyone from his office. The Capitol Hill Club is a popular fundraising spot, and noting that in the tips section on their Foursquare page will alert visitors to past fundraisers held there.

These tips aren't just useful at the national level. For instance, if you happen to check into the Wisconsin State Capitol Building, you might find information on Senate Republican Leader Scott Fitzgerald useful.

Want some great resources to help you leave savvy tips? Here are a few we suggest:

• Influence Explorer
• OpenCongress
• OpenGovernment
• OpenSecrets
• Political Party Time

Please keep in mind that the point of Tips is to make helpful information available to future visitors, so make your comments constructive. (Information (not jerkiness) is power.) Also, not all political offices and spaces have been logged into Foursquare yet. If you find that to be the case, why not add them yourself and share a useful tip while you're at it?

Today, our guest post is written by Mario Roset and Rosario Gonzalez Morón of Wingu, based in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Wingu is a Latin American NGO that helps local non-profits leverage technology for the benefit of civil society.

For some years, we have been working with nonprofits all over Latin America to improve their use of the Internet to fulfill their missions. The region has many challenges in terms of technology, starting from low – though fast growing - bandwidth penetration, to a common lack of incentives in the public sector to jump into the digital age.

Like any other, public advocacy organizations also have their own issues: they are poorly financed, understaffed, and usually prefer a “let’s repeat what has worked before” offline approach for their programs, cutting back on innovation. For them, the Internet may be the big thing, but also the unknown.

Our answer for them to this dilemma is simple: don’t invent anything; just adopt what’s out there. We believe that the best way to be innovative in the context of extremely limited resources is to find new uses for mainstream, standardized tools, or to adapt successful initiatives to your context. Here are some examples:

Dinero y Política is an initiative of Poder Ciudadano Foundation ("Citizen Power Foundation") is an interactive database and a wiki that aggregates political finance data in real time from 23 different provincial databases and tracks 713 recognized political parties (414 of which participate as members of 97 different coalitions).

Drug Map of Argentina is a citizen-lead initiative, created by the Anti-drug Association of Argentina that uses a blog and Google Maps to gather information about drug production and distribution around the country.

Congreso Averto is a Brazilian initiative that makes public the information about lawmaking in the national congress. It follows the path of many other proven projects, like OpenCongress (US), and TheyWorkForYou (UK). Vota Inteligente is a similar initiative from Chile that takes information from Congressional websites to make it accessible to citizens. Congreso Visible, from Colombia, depends exclusively on a massive volunteering force to keep their site updated with information that is not on the Congress’ website.

Cuidemos el Voto is a Mexican website that uses Ushahidi standard technology to crowdsource information about improper conduct and fraud in Mexican elections, and display it on a map. There are many more examples of Ushahidi implementations here.

If you’re interested in a more detailed account of each of these initiatives, and also want to discover many others from all around the southern hemisphere, we recommend that you visit David Sasaki’s Technology for Transparency Review.

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).

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

Alan Fram with the Associated Press wrote about how the health insurance industry is fighting to prevent the Congress from passing a health care overhaul that includes a government-run plan to compete with private insurers. Fram cites data from the Center for Responsive Politics to show how health insurers have made $41 million in campaign contributions to current congressional lawmakers since 1989, “with more than half going to lawmakers on the five House and Senate panels writing this year’s health bills.” Since the beginning of 2008, insurers have spent $145 million on lobbying.

The New York Times' Jack Rosenthal, in writing the paper’s “On Language” column, mentioned how Andrew Raseij, Sunlight’s senior technology advisor and co-director of Personal Democracy Forum, is pushing for a federal law that redefines “public” to mean searchable and readable online. U.S. Rep. Steve Israel (N.Y.) is drafting just such legislation. Rosenthal also noted how the Senate does not disclose campaign-contribution information to the Federal Election Commission in an electronic form. “That means it must be digitized by the commission, by which time the next election may well have come and gone. Transparent? Yes, but also emasculated,” Rosenthal wrote.

Federal Computer Week’s Ben Bain wrote about how the Obama administration is asking federal agencies to gear their spending plans for science and technology in fiscal 2011 toward projects designed to drive economic growth, create energy independence, improve health, and bolster security, according to recently issued general guidance. Peter Orszag, Obama’s OMB director, outlined the new emphasis in an August 4th memo (PDF). Craig Jennings, a senior federal fiscal policy analyst with OMB Watch, said the memo is an indication that science and technology will be high priorities for the administration.

Colin Barr at Fortune magazine wrote about how skeptics are questioning a claim made by Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner last Sunday on ABC’s “This Week.” Geithner said taxpayers have made a small profit, $6 billion, on their investments in banks via the Troubled Asset Relief Program. Barr quotes Marcus Peacock, Pew’s project director of Subsidyscope saying the government isn’t doing enough to document what’s happening with the money. Peacock said government data collection projects are often “pockmarked” with omissions and outright errors, a pattern that hasn’t been broken with the financial bailouts. Despite the administration’s public embrace of transparency, it has failed to provide full and understandable disclosure of its actions in TARP, Peacock said.

The Brattleboro (Vt.) Reformer editorialized about the Blue Dog Coalition’s effect on the health care debate in Congress, using Dan Eggen’s article in last Friday’s edition of The Washington Post. The editorial notes Eggen citing Party Time’s compilation of records of political fundraisers since 2008. “America has been waiting for more than 60 years for universal health care. (The) Blue Dogs wouldn’t mind if it took another 60 years to give Americans what every other advanced nation in the world now has,” the editorial says. “This is yet another example of how our current system of legalized bribery, otherwise known as campaign contributions, distorts the democratic process.”

Beth Sussman, writing at the National Journal’s “Under the Influence” blog, OpenCongress' redesign. She quotes OpenCongress’ David Moore, “You never hear somebody at a bar talking about clause 56 in H.R. 3200.” So OpenCongress “enables peer-to-peer communication about the best information on bills in Congress.” Sussman reports how the site now has an email form, so you can send an email to contact lawmakers about legislation, a tracking tool so you can compare how you would vote on a piece of legislation with how your representative has voted and a personalized list of legislation you may support or oppose. “There was a real opportunity to bring together this confusing government data with helpful data and what people were saying about it,” David said. The site aims to “make all the information about Congress more accessible to people who aren’t necessarily Congress-buffs.”

USA Today wrote about documents made public by the Project on Government Oversight (POGO) that showed how Amtrak wanted to fire its independent Inspector General, who was effectively forced to resign several weeks ago. The IG and the rail carrier had feuded since it was revealed in 2006 that Amtrak had spent more than $100 million in mismanaged fees to private lawyers over a five year period, allegedly violating Amtrak billing rules.

The Lincoln (Neb.) Journal Star editorialized about the need for congressional lawmakers to read legislation they are voting on. They mentioned how Sunlight is one of a number of organizations advocating that Congress put all legislation online 72 hours before they conduct a vote. The editorial called on Nebraska’s congressional delegation to support such a proposal.

Here are a few of the more interesting media mentions of Sunlight and our friends and allies from the week:

Last Friday evening's June 26th program, CNN's Lou Dobbs broadcasted a piece by correspondent Louise Schiavone about the Cap and Trade Energy Bill that the House of Representatives was to vote on and pass later that evening. Schiavone interviewed Jake Brewer, Sunlight’s engagement director, who said, "This is the kind of bill that's going to affect our economy on a massive scale, our climate, our national security, and is not the kind of thing to be taken lightly. The opacity of this process is -- to be perfectly honest, it's infuriating." Schiavone then stated erroneously that Sunlight opposed the bill. For the record, Sunlight has no position on the content of the bill itself, but advocates for the Congress to put all non-emergency legislation online for 72 hours before voting on it. The transcript can be read here, and the video is below.

Along those lines, Sunlight’s advocacy for the 72-hour rule helped generate a couple of good editorials. Heather Long, deputy editorial page editor for The (Harrisburg, Pa.) Patriot-News , wrote a strong editorial in favor of the 72-hour rule. "It's so basic it should not even have to be said: Lawmakers should know what they are voting on. In order to do that, they need time to review bills, and that takes more than a few hours for things as lengthy and complex as climate change and health care."

The (Olympia, Wash.) Olympian editorializes about U.S. Rep. Brian Baird (Wash.) introducing House Resolution 554, which would require the House to honor the 72-hour rule with all non-emergency bills and conference reports. "If Congress is at all interested in restoring public trust and confidence in its operations, the members will pass Congressman Baird’s 72-hour rule," the editorial says.

National Public Radio's Don Gonyea reports on the Obama administration backtracking on openness, centering on the White House's refusal to make public its visitor logs. He quotes Melanie Sloan, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington’s director, "Once all the pretty speeches were over in the first couple of days, the record now isn't quite so great." Regarding the visitor logs, "Not only did the administration refuse to provide those records, we have sued them, and... they are making the same argument that the Bush administration did, that these are presidential records, even though this argument has already lost in court," Melanie said. Gonyea quotes Ellen Miller, Sunlight's director, noting the positive steps taken by the administration on opening government data. "What the administration is beginning to deliver is an openness when it comes to a certain level of White House deliberations and with respect to government data. Time will tell how this all plays out, but even in the first six months of the administration, we're seeing far more openness than we've seen in modern history." Listen here

The Wall Street Journal used Center for Responsive Politics data to show how the financial industry did something quite surprising...They cut spending on lobbying and campaign contributions. In this year’s first quarter, banks and other financial institutions spent $104.7 million to lobby Congress and the administration, down 8% from the same period last year. And the industry made $19.9 million in political contributions in the first three months of 2009, which is a 65% decrease from the same period in 2007 and a 13% drop from the same period in 2005, just after the last presidential election cycle, the Journal reports. Since CRP has been keeping records, the financial industry has been the top giver of political contributions and the top spender on lobbying activities, giving $2.2 billion since 1990 and spending $3.6 billion on lobbying since 1998. This year’s decline coincides with the public’s diminished image of financial institutions. Meanwhile, the health care industry is spending the most on lobbying these days, increasing its spending in the first quarter by 12% to $127.1 million.

The Boston Globe highlighted a CRP analysis that shows how consumer groups that favor health reform are being "decidedly outspent and out-lobbied by drug manufacturers, insurers, HMOs, and doctors' associations." In the first quarter of this year, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the biggest spender on lobbying since 1998, and the Pharmaceutical Researchers and Manufacturers of America together spent $22.5 million to influence the debate. In contrast, Families USA, a leading advocate for health reform from the consumer’s perspective, has spent $10,000 on lobbying this year.

Writing at The Wall Street Journal's "Digits" blog, Marisa Taylor reported on the Personal Democracy Forum conference held earlier this week in New York. She quotes Ellen from a closing panel, “I think that we’re going to look back on 2009 as the year in which the tide shifted." Rather than placing the burden of government transparency on non-profits to create online databases that track government spending, new government Web sites like Data.gov and Recovery.gov are creating a “remarkable shift in responsibility” wherein the government must explain itself to its citizenry, Ellen said. But Congress will be “the tougher nut to crack."

Sunlight Labs’ launch of TransparencyCorps at the PDF conference generated good media interest. Eliza Krigman with the National Journal quoted Ellen, "Sunlight and future partners can provide micro-tasks that when aggregated, help solve research and data analysis problems when computers alone cannot properly scrutinize government information." Columbia Journalism Review’s Clint Hendler quoted Clay Johnson, Sunlight Labs’ director, “We have a problem at Sunlight. That is that our government gives us data that our computers can’t understand, and there’s nothing we can do about it but work harder.” Marshall Kirkpatrick with ReadWriteWeb wrote, "The innovative system is a pleasure to use and is being open sourced for other organizations interested in crowdsourcing similar tasks. You can honestly do something useful and important in 5 minutes or less on this site." And on his Joho the Blog site, David Weinberger, co-author of “The Cluetrain Manifesto,” highlighted both TransparencyCorps' launch and OpenCongress' redesign.

Anthony Mattox, a very talented student at Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA), recently released some processing code called WikiWeb to visualize the connections between pages at Wikipedia.

I read about the project and thought, "I wonder if that would work with OpenCongress's wiki?" I grabbed the open sourced creative commons code, changed a few URLs to point to OpenCongress's Wiki and voilà.

It is running in the browser as a Java applet, so you will need to "trust" it before it will "work." Don't worry, it doesn't do anything nefarious. It just needs your trust before it can go to OpenCongress and fetch pages from the wiki.

Once it loads, you'll want to click the dot in the middle "Main Page" and select the first option on the left of the menu which will "load links" and then you're off. Any dot (which represents a page of the wiki) can be expanded to show the other pages it links to.

Just something fun to demonstrate the value of open source, Creative Commons and of course Processing. Thanks to Anthony for making the code available!