A community analysis of U.S. legislation, hosted at GovTrack.us.
There was a short New York Times article in yesterday’s Circuits section about GovTrack, and as a result the number of registered users on the site has topped 1,000!
The article reached a broad audience, and I’ve gotten a few emails from people running other websites who share the common goal of seeing technology put to use for various ways in politics. Many exciting things will no doubt come from this.
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Now that GovTrack is pretty much functionally complete, I’m shifting my focus to how websites with similar goals as GovTrack can
share data, collaborate, and generally benefit from each other.
This is
partly what we’ve been talking about on the GovTrack mail list regarding making the
California-level data compatible in some sense with GovTrack’s data.
Hopefully in the next few weeks there will be a new website that will be
a place for a community about this to develop. Once the website is up,
I’m going to start bringing in other people interested in hacking out an
RDF data model for political information, and then we’ll start to decide
on the specifics of the data model (e.g. how to assign IDs to politicians). Â
And from there, a semantic web of political information could start to
form. That’ll be pretty neat.
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Last night Technorati, a blog search engine, announced the winners of their first developers contest, and GovTrack scored #1 for integrating the blogosphere with the world of U.S. legislation. Needless to say, this is a great start to 2005.
“Want to know the status of a bill on the floor of Congress, who misses the most votes, or who gets the most bills passed? GovTrack.us is like School House Rock on steroids for adults (oh, and children). Govtrack.us uses the Technorati API to show what bloggers are saying about bills as they work their way through Congress. Joshua won a $2,500 gift certificate.”
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The 109th Congress began on Tuesday and GovTrack is ready for the next two years of serving information for you.
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