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.

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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.

In the public interest world, POGO is using the widget to follow issues like improving the state of the federal contracting system, which I heard they used to pay a for profit organization to monitor for them. American Rights at Work is using OpenCongress.org’s bill tracker widget to keep union advocates updated on latest developments affecting The Employee Free
Choice Act. (We think the bill tracker widget, in particular, should be of immense value to issue organizations involved in legislative advocacy.)

We’re also excited to see that Courier-Journal (home-town paper, after all) editor Mark Schaver is using an OpenCongress.org widget to keep readers of his of Depth Reporting blog updated on the most viewed bills regarding freedom of information.

Bloggers from Texas and Utah went a step further and are using Widgetbox to create new "blidgets" (who knew there was such a thing?….it’s a widget that shows information gotten from a blog). They are using OpenCongress widgets to keep tabs on several members of Congress’ latest votes and bill sponsorship.

The fun doesn’t stop there. New widgets are in the works: MAPLight.org will offer a "Money and Votes" widget, which will track the correlation between campaign contributions and votes on bills in Congress (available on September 30th) and OpenCongress.org is developing its own widgets for members of Congress to make it easier for local local political bloggers to simply enter their zip code, and return widgets for their senators and representative. Look for an update about yet another widget OpenCongress.org has in the works to help you with your watchdogging.

Are you using these widgets? Let us know.

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The crazy-smart folks at the Participatory Politics Foundation who do all the hard work at OpenCongress.org are ready to show off two new ‘widgets.’ One is for tracking bills and the second lets you track issues in Congress. The bill tracking widget allows you to display the status of any bill in the Congressional pipeline, as well as link to news and blog coverage of that bill.

The issue widget lets you select from one of more than 4,000 different issue areas, and display either the most recent bills or the most-viewed bills in that issue area for your community. We figure this ought to be pretty useful to folks who follow issues, rather than specific pieces of legislation.

And the team at OpenCongress.org had made it easier to make social wisdom about Congress more widely accessible across the internet, so they added social sharing buttons to pages for every bill, Member of Congress, and issue area throughout the site. These buttons allow one-click re-publishing of any page to popular services like Digg, del.icio.us, MyYahoo, NetVibes, and many more — there’s even a one-click button to e-mail any page to your friends. Check it out on this example.

Have at it. For any technical questions, get in touch with David Moore at drm at ppolitics.org.

Update: The folks over at POGO already have one of the widgets installedd.

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Sunlight is launching a new project this morning — OpenCongress.org — that we are very excited about. This is is joint effort with the amazing team from the Participatory Politics Foundation — a group based in Worcester, Mass. that builds open-source software and web tools for civic engagement.

Think of this as a user-friendly Thomas, on steriods. We've brought together critically important information about what is happening in Congress –legislation and issue focused — and combined that with what bloggers and the mainstream media are most talking about. We've added a component of social wisdom tracking what's hot and what's most-viewed on the site itself, along with what others are writing about. There are lots of links to other Sunlight projects like Congresspedia and Sunlight grantees like OpenSecrets.org. We are aiming to to offer a comprehensive, understandable, user-friendly snapshot of every bill and Member of Congress.

For example, you'll find:

* Official government information from Thomas, made available by GovTrack.us
* News and blog coverage of Congress from Google News and Technorati
* Links to profiles of each Member of Congress on the publicly-editable wiki Congresspedia
* Campaign contribution information from the non-profit OpenSecrets.org
* The Congress Gossip Blog, written by OpenCongress site editors, a blog that highlights useful news & blog reporting from around the web.

We hope that bloggers, and activists and researchers link to OpenCongress when discussing a bill, a Member of Congress, or an issue area. We think the new site will help make the Congressional activities more understandable to a wide audience.

The next four months of this site are a beta phase. We are actively soliciting comments and feedback so please let us know what you think…what new features you'd like, how we can make it even more "friendly" and useful.

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