A community analysis of U.S. legislation, hosted at GovTrack.us.
Yesterday OpenCongress.org launched It is basically a sister site to GovTrack, but with different parents (i.e. we’re not affiliated). Based on the data that GovTrack makes available for others to reuse, OpenCongress will be focusing on collaborative analysis of legislation. I think there’s room enough in the world for two sites like this, so it’s great to see another avenue for transparency in government.
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If you use the special GovTrack browser search box in Firefox or IE7, you can now search previous Congresses: just add a slash and the Congress number, like H.R. 1828/108 or accountability/107.
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Just posted a new figure on the statistics page showing the increasing reelection rates of incumbents. Do they have a growing advantage over challengers or are we just growing more content with our representatives? Until 1900, incumbents were reelected just 60% of the time. By 1950, it was 80%; and these days it is around 90%.
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It’s rare when Congress asks the people for help being transparent, and so I’m particularly pleased to announce the formation of The Open House Project, a Sunlight Foundation-sponsored project with the encouragement of Speaker Pelosi that will be making specific proposals about how The House can better use the Internet in the interests of transparency. Various people, including myself, will be blogging on that site over the next few weeks about some ideas on this point. Feel free to contribute your ideas by commenting on the TOHP website, joining the project’s mail list, or talking on GovTrack’s own mail list.
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