Busy as always, we’ve got some more new things on GovTrack this month:

• Congressional District Maps now include redistricting maps for the upcoming elections. Except for Rhode Island — we’re still working on locating the new districts there. You can switch back and forth between your current district and the district you’ll be voting in this November.
• The bills page has a new Statistics Tab where you can compare the number of bills enacted in each Congressional session since 1979 and see when during a session bills tend to be introduced and enacted.
• The site now works better on mobile devices with small screen, and we’ll keep improving that.
• Bill text comparisons are now available for comparisons between versions of a single bill and between selected different but related bills.
• The font size has been increased throughout the site in response to feedback we got early on when the new site design went live in March.
• The search pages have been fixed to work on Internet Explorer, they are faster, and got some other usability tweaks.

Last post I wrote that I’d be changing the data licensing terms on GovTrack. I sincerely asked for feedback, and I got it. Gunnar, for instance, rightly pointed out that this isn’t everyone’s fight. He also noted that my dry sense of humor wasn’t really working.

The change I planned would have created substantial burdens for re-users of GovTrack’s data and yet would have had little impact, except possibly to annoy end-users. So I’m going to make a different change. This is a lot simpler:

You may not disparage services for being nonpartisan.

This will go into the terms of service to access the regularly updated raw data and API starting tomorrow. (It does not affect regular users of GovTrack or of any of the users of the tools that use GovTrack data.)

I don’t know of any current licensees that were a part of the boycott that started all of this, but I don’t know everyone who uses GovTrack’s data. If your organization can’t handle the new term, then I’m not above saying you can get your data elsewhere.

That said, the source code for the scripts that gather the data remain open source under the GNU AGPL license (see this github project for v2). And I do create special license agreements with other organizations as necessary. So there are at least two routes around this.

***

This all began because some random guys said some other company should be boycotted for being nonpartisan. It really had nothing to do with me. But as I explained to techPresident I was appalled that:

“This is the first time that someone’s called what our community does ‘evil,’” Tauberer said in an e-mail. “I don’t take that lightly. PCCC’s Rosenbaum had better stand behind that if he is going to be so brash. Is he going to take the links to GovTrack off of the PCCC web site? Because right now those links support the right’s ability to get the same information.”

I think the open gov community is used to me curmudgeonly complaining about various things. Sometimes I try to be polite. But, honestly, I’ve gotten tired of being mostly complacent. In June I called out Rep. Crenshaw for trying to slow down legislative transparency and got almost 1,500 letters sent to Congress about it. This month I’m calling out this ridiculous boycott. Yeah, this might be the start of a new pattern.

A colleague pointed out to me over the weekend that the open source movement has a long history of using licenses to promote ideological positions. The GNU GPL license — the ‘viral’ license that is part of the backbone of the open source world — says you can use my software if you believe in the same sort of openness that I do. The GPL also prevents licensees from exercising software patent rights — which is in many ways a political statement. One of the earliest leaders of the free software movement believes it is a moral imperative for computing technology to be free (free as in freedom). Over at Creative Commons, licenses make a distinction between commercial and non-commercial use, which is something that to a for-profit guy like me thinks is pretty arbitrary.

So I’m not the first to think that giving stuff away can come with substantive terms and still be open. Though in my case, the license is a terms of service, not a copyright license, so the comparison with open source only goes so far.

I sent the following message out to the GovTrack data developers mail list. It affects anyone who uses GovTrack’s bulk raw data downloads and API.

Dear data re-users,

This is advanced notice that on July 20 I’ll be revising the terms of GovTrack’s generic license agreement by adding the following paragraph:

* During the time in which your organization is reusing GovTrack’s database, your website must block visitors referred by the websites of sponsors of the Netroots Nation conference. If you make the data available in bulk to others, your license agreement must carry over the same terms.

In techPresident today, Netroots Nation’s executive director Raven Brooks encouraged progressive advocacy groups to boycott NationBuilder, a non-partisan technology platform that helps campaigns build their websites, because NationBuilder sells services to right-leaning organizations. There’s a complicated history here that’s touched on in the techPresident article (http://techpresident.com/news/22556/nationbuilders-mammoth-deal-state-level-republican-committee-sparks-calls-boycott), but Brooks’s point seems to boil down to a belief that there can be no nonpartisan political tools.

GovTrack, and most tools that reuse its database, is a nonpartisan tool that has played an important role in political activism over the last several years on both sides of the political aisle. It is astonishing to me that anyone would think that technology infrastructure should choose sides. Especially since it appears that the sponsors of past Netroots Nations conferences have been users of nonpartisan political technology platforms like GovTrack. If they are going to boycott tools like GovTrack, they certainly won’t notice the change to GovTrack’s license terms.

Your feedback on these changes is welcome, especially if the feedback is in the style of satire. But this isn’t a joke. Ridiculous boycotts of technology startups require ridiculous responses.