When I first wrote about the OpenCongress.org new tools release, I was really excited. The ability to easily syndicate legislative information should help empower government data consumers. They’ve now released a new set of tools, which allow for syndication (through RSS and embeddable boxes) for customizable issues and also specific bills.
This is a pretty big step forward, since far more organizations will be interested in including specific legislation than they were in displaying frequently viewed or frequently blogged about legislation.
I just tried it out, and inserted a tool for monitoring the progess of S.1 in the sidebar of this site. The interface is well designed, with a preview of what the box will look like, and also color controls for text, background, and border.
When searching for the correct bill, the search is intuitive and functions better than the THOMAS search engine, despite the THOMAS engine being a part of the system on which OpenCongress (through GovTrack.us) are based. I haven’t yet figured out why, but THOMAS’s search is pretty difficult to use. Out of the variety of possible search inputs for popular bills (eg. S.1, s.1 s1, S1, S 1, s 1, etc.), it seems that only a few work, and I never seem to enter the correct one. (Searching “1″ on THOMAS yields “1 is an invalid bill number,” while on GovTrack and OpenCongress spit out at least a field of results.
Search quirks aside, I’m glad to see the folks at OpenCongress designing tools with users in mind, and this latest set of syndication tools should significantly increase the number of people taking advantage of them (as POGO is in this example).
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2 responses so far ↓
Joshua Tauberer // Aug 17, 2007 at 11:56 am
Boy, their bill status widgets sure look like the ones from GovTrack that I threw here a while back:
http://www.theopenhouseproject.com/resources/pendingbills
Lobbying Updates | The Open House Project // Aug 17, 2007 at 3:48 pm
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