Sometimes congressional seats come fixed with a superstitious quality; a curse, perhaps. North Carolina’s Class 3 Senate seat is famous... View Article
Continue readingLook for Sunlight @ Netroots Nation
A large contingent of Sunlighters are heading to Austin this week for Netroots Nation, the 3rd annual gathering of Kos... View Article
Continue readingPDF Day 2
PDF on Day Two is great. Great morning presentations by Lessig and Zittrain (two folks whose work I already know)... View Article
Continue readingOpenCongress: New Features
The folks at OpenCongress, a Sunlight joint project with Participatory Politics Foundation, are making great strides at building the place... View Article
Continue readingThe Nice Polite Campaign to Gently Encourage Parliament to Publish Bills in a 21st Century Way, Please. Now.
It's quite surprising, but the UK's House of Commons does not put the text of its bills on the Web in a user-friendly manner, making it bloody difficult -- as they would say -- for British citizens to know what's really going on in Parliament when it comes to legislating.
Earlier today, our friends at MySociety.org, the U.K.-based nonprofit that builds Web sites to open up government and its services to benefit citizens, launched a campaign to convince Parliament to embrace the Internet Age.
The goal of the Free Our Bills campaign is to have Parliament put the text of bills online. The effort is titled "The Nice Polite Campaign to Gently Encourage Parliament to Publish Bills in a 21 Century Way, Please. Now." (We'll give it an award for simply being the best named campaign ever.) How polite and British. (American style would be something like "Just Do It.")
Continue readingTwo Events for Open Government Fans
We're continuing the Sunshine Week festivities with two events dedicated to promoting a more open government. We invite you to join us, and for those of you who can't make it to Washington, DC, we encourage you to watch the webcasts of the events.
Today at 1pm EDT, in conjunction with Open the Government, Greg Elin of Sunlight Labs will moderate a panel to demonstrate new ways nonprofits have made government data open and useful to the public.
It’s All Starting to Come Together
Dan Newman, of MAPLight (and Sunlight grantee) writes to say:
We just added links to OpenCongress from every bill on MAPLight. It's part of our new "In the News" tab. For example click here.The link to the same bill on OpenCongress is just above the "Date" column on the right-hand side.
We also created a simple URL structure to make it easy for OpenCongress and others to link to specific bills on MAPLight. (Inbound links like this now work.
We're also in the process of integrating Congresspedia entries into MAPLight's legislator pages, pending some changes on the Congresspedia side to make this technically workable.
And David Moore, of OpenCongress responds saying:
This is great stuff. Check it the interconnections between these two sites. Continue readingWe're happily in the midst of adding reciprocal links on our bill pages. Shouldn't be long.
New Insanely Useful P2P Features from OpenCongress.org
With Congress returning to start a new session, our friends at OpenCongress – a project of the Sunlight Foundation and the Participatory Politics Foundation – are making it easier than ever to track and rate what’s happening on Capitol Hill and organize support for the legislation and issues you care about.
It has never been easier to track and now rate what’s happening in your government. And it’s never been easier to meet friends and organize support for the legislation and issues you care about.
We’re very excited to unveil My OpenCongress – the first-ever social network designed for people who care about Congress. This is very cool: My OpenCongress provides a personalized view of all the information you want about the laws being made in Washington. It’s an easy-to-use, peer-to-peer way of sharing the most useful information about Congress, perfect for bloggers and membership groups. And if you want to organize a call-in day to let Congress know what you think, you can easily get in touch with other constituents in your district and mobilize your wider friends network.
Congress, We ARE Watching
OpenCongress.org is announcing a new widget today called: "Congress, I'm Watching." It's a new tool that lets bloggers, activists, organizations and citizens share a concise summary of any bills in Congress that they are following. We are really excited about this one:
All too often, political blogs and membership groups don't have a good online resource to connect the issues they're discussing to actual bills in Congress. With the new "Congress, I'm Watching" widget, organizations have a timely way of tracking the status of bills and issues that they care about in Congress on their own home pages and online communities of all kinds can encourage collective oversight for what Congress is doing. Political blogs that are tracking specific issues can also use the widget to follow legislation that's near and dear to their heart.
Like all our widgets, it's free to use, customizable, and only takes a minute to put on your website. For an example of how it looks, please see OpenCongress.org's sample.
Continue reading
Widgets, Blidgets and Nods
As we recently reported, MAPLight.org and OpenCongress.org recently launched widgets to make it easy for anyone to keep track of the presidential money race, current bills and legislative issues on their site or blog. What good is political information if it's relegated to to just one Web site? As John wrote on the Open House Project blog, widgets and other new forms of data visualization help spread the information further and faster.
There's clear interest in adopting these widgets to surface information about the federal government in new ways and we love some of these early adopters. TechRepublican just recently incorporated the MAPLight.org presidential fundraising widget on its site and NTEN is planning on using
using MAPLight.org's new API.
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