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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