As any regular reader of our blog knows, OpenCongress is a Sunlight flagship site — a partnership with the amazing team at the Participatory Politics Foundation. It combines official government data with news and blog coverage, social networking, public participation tools, all to reveal to users what’s really happening in Congress. Today, OpenCongress has launched their latest redesign and their most major site upgrade ever. These improvements represent a big leap forward in meeting our goals of revealing how Congress makes law and opening the process to more citizen participation.

There are lots of new and improved features that allow users to “watchdog” and better communicate with Congress on issues and individual bills. A social tracking function gives users the ability to see what legislation is important to other users. And OpenCongress also has now combined detailed data all in one place, such as campaign contribution data from the Center for Responsive Politics and MAPLight.org. Another very cool feature is RaceTracker, which follows every election for the U.S. Senate, U.S. House and each state’s governor.Plus the OpenCongress API allows Web programmers to remix and share all the data on the site.

Congratulations to the OpenCongress team for this next great step.