Every once in a while, I like to digress and talk about things that I think are cool. Well, actually I do that all the time, after all that is the point of blogging. But, in this case, the topic (or site) I would like to talk about is an item which really illustrates just how much of an equalizing democratic force the Internet can be. The site I’m referring to is called opencongress.org.
For me, the United States Congress is like this black box. As a black box, in my opinion, we common Americans have very little insight into what Congress actually does. Instead, the most we see or hear is what mass media or public radio is willing to summarize (mostly worthless in my humble opinion). In other words, short of watching C-SPAN, every second of the day or digging up all of the related information provided by the Federal government, Congress remains this enigma. Thus, I’m always left with this burning question: Is Congress really representing my needs?
Well… through the miracle that is often referred to as the Internet. I had stumbled upon the OpenCongress site sometime ago (maybe I read something somewhere) and was simply amazed at how it acts a focus point of information related to what Congress is up to. To accomplish this astounding feat, the site “uses structured data scraped from THOMAS by GovTrack.us to show legislative information – bills, committees, member profiles – in a more useable format.” But, the best part is that the site is open-source and for the most part community focused which implies “non-partisanship”.
If you are interested in this site, please look at other projects of the Sunlight Foundation. For example, I like followthemoney.org which is committed to revealing the influence of campaign money on state-level elections and public policy.
