OpenCongress is Open Source

[Jennifer Bell]

I was browsing through the archives, and I noticed this post on Open Congress from last year.  

At PDF08, the Sunlight Foundation mentioned that OpenCongress was open source, so in theory it might not be hard to clone this site and hook it up the the Canadian bill RSS feeds on LegisINFO, here:

http://www.parl.gc.ca/LEGISINFO/index.asp?Language=E&List=list&Type=1&Chamber=S&StartList=2&EndList=200&Session=15

The trac link to the codebase from the OpenCongress website seems to be broken, however.

The challenge with this sort of project would be publicising the site enough to get a reasonable user base.
 
Jennifer Bell
visiblegovernment.ca

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Hugh McGuire h.mcguire at sympatico.ca
Wed Feb 28 14:40:01 EST 2007

wowza looks great...how do we get one?

On Feb 27, 2007, at 1:48 PM, Michael Lenczner wrote:

> OpenCongress -- ripping open the doors to Congress with Web 2.0
>
> OpenCongress.org is a new site that Web 2.0's the US government,
> bringing much-needed transparency and accountability to the closed
> book that is the US Congress. It is the first project of the new
> Pariticpatory Politics Foundation (founded by the same young geniuses
> who gave us the Participatory Culture Foundation and its stunning
> Democracy Internet TV player). Co-creator David Moore describes it
> thus:
>
>     "One of the problems we were aiming to address is that there is a
> lack of comprehensive, usable web resources for people and groups
> writing about bills and issues in Congress. The Library of Congress
> website, Thomas, doesn't do nearly enough to make Congressional
> information accessible -- meaning that political bloggers didn't have
> anywhere helpful to link when discussing Congress, that there wasn't a
> way for their readers to get the "big picture" behind an issue. The
> lack of public knowledge about what's really happening in Congress
> breeds apathy about political change in general.
>
>     OpenCongress helps close the information gap between political
> insiders and the public by bringing together official government
> information from Thomas (by way of GovTrack.us), news articles from
> Google News, blog posts from Technorati, campaign contribution data
> from OpenSecrets.org, and more -- to give you the real story behind
> what's happening in Congress. "
>
> Link - http://www.opencongress.org/
>
> boingboing link: http://www.boingboing.net/2007/02/26/ 
> opencongress_ripping.html
>
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