On Friday, we told you about the happy ending to months of negotiations to modernize the Franking rules that govern how members of Congress can use the Internet to communicate with us about their work. The new rules just passed by the House and Senate allow members of Congress to communicate with us on sites such as Twitter, YouTube and Flickr without recrimination. (We advocated for these rules changes through our bipartisan collaborative effort, the Open House Project, and through our popular Let Our Congress Tweet campaign, the first Twitter-based petition to Congress, which hundreds of you joined.)

Before these new rules were passed, lawmakers could not officially embed a YouTube video on their official Web site, nor could they join us in political conversations around the popular virtual water cooler that Twitter has become.

To celebrate this historic precedent, we created Capitol Tweets, a widget you can embed on your site that updates you every 10 minutes with the latest tweets from members of Congress who use Twitter.

Download the widget, and while you’re watching the tweets fly, check out this effort by David All (who co-wrote the Open House Project chapter on Franking reform with Sunlight’s Paul Blumenthal) to grade them on their tweets.

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Shouldn’t members of Congress be able to connect with all of us freely and easily online? I’d guess most of you would think that’s a good idea. So, when Sunlight’s Open House Project Google group got riled up this week about this issue, we were inspired to do something to rally citizens to ensure lawmakers can freely connect with us all online.

In that spirit, we are launching a new campaign, Let Our Congress Tweet, to urge Congress to make clear guidelines that do not inhibit lawmakers from freely interacting with constituents where they already go online to share ideas-through Web services like YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and MySpace.

Join our petition right now and make your voice count.

Last year, Sunlight’s Open House Project issued a report recommending straightforward technological reforms to increase transparency and public access to the work and members of the U.S. House of Representatives. One of our major recommendations was to permit lawmakers to take full advantage of Internet resources. Wonks will know this as our recommendation to modernize the Franking Rules that govern how members of Congress use the Internet to communicate with constituents, primarily through their official Web sites.

Unfortunately, these rules are decided ad hoc in advisory opinions. (A guidebook given to lawmakers about all their activities includes some rules about their Web use. When Congress first developed rules governing lawmakers’ use of the Internet, it viewed the new medium as an extension of telephones, mail, radio and television, putting e-mail and member Web sites under the purview of franking regulations. Franking regulations were developed to restrict lawmakers’ sending of unsolicited mailings to constituents, but today the differences between the old and new forms of communication are so great that a rethinking of franking policy over electronic communications is necessary.

Under the current system, members of Congress are forced to break rules to use new technologies and services to do what their constituents ask of them: connect, listen and be held accountable. So, that YouTube video you saw on a lawmaker’s Web site? Illegal! Couple that with the vagueness of only having ad hoc opinions to guide lawmakers in their Internet communications on a case-by-case basis, and you get confusion as to what lawmakers are or aren’t allowed to do…resulting in a chilling effect.

As Congress reconsiders the restrictions placed on congressional Internet use, you can tell Congress to embrace the communication technologies that we already use. Join us and tweet the petition now.

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