Here’s what’s been happening with the site this summer:

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• We’ve upgraded our hardware to top-of-the-line equipment so that we can keep up with the increasing number of visitors coming to GovTrack.
• I’ve hired a moderator (my first staff member!) to process the submissions to the section of the site. A long backlog of submissions awaiting approval built up while I was on vacation — hopefully never again. This also frees up my time for other things.
• We’re now recommending Twitter hashtags like #usbill and #hr3200 for bills. See . No sooner did we recommend #usbill that people started
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• Pages for bills now show industry supporters and opponents thanks to , and for enacted bills now show who was president and signed it. Cosponsors are now shown in bold if you are tracking them.
• Pages for cloture votes now link to which has more information on the issue of filibusters.
• You can now jump to a congressional distristrct by , and if you hover your mouse over a congressional district on the maps page it tells you which district it is above the map.
• You now don’t have to create a new account on GovTrack to store your trackers or get email updates. You can log in using your Google, OpenID, or some other existing logins you may already have.
• Various small mistakes were fixed: California is now listed as having 54 districts, not 53, on the maps page.
• The bill text pages should load  faster now for long bills.
• Pages for Members of Congress now show their latest tweets, if they are on Twitter.

GovTrack is going to be upgrading its hardware very soon now. We’ll probably be down for about a day while we get the new hardware set up. Thanks for your patience. Read it all..

GovTrack has taken the plunge to Twitter. I’ll be tweeting from time to time as . Also, I’ve put up recommended hashtags  on the pages for bills so we can more easily track the chatter on legislation happening in the twitterverse. (It’s in the blue box on the right side.)

You might have noticed the last blog post was a bit out of the ordinary here. It wasn’t written by me, and it’s coverage of a recent congressional hearing. I’m starting up a new experiment, a citizen reporters team to cover the goings on in congress that the mainstream press doesn’t. Stay tuned!

Bring your participation in government to Facebook with two new Facebook apps, RepresentedBy and Laws I Like. These apps, written by some other civic hackers, are based (in part) on congressional data shared by GovTrack.

, by , lets you post to your profile a box with who represents you in Congress, shows the latest bills and news related to them. You can also challenge your friends to see if they know their Members of Congress, and it has an interesting metric of how digitally-transparent your Members of Congress are.  The app was an honorable mention in .

, by Chris Poliquin, lets you search for bills, vote on them, and then post your votes to your profile to tell your friends what they should get their Members of Congress to support or oppose. You can also see what bills your friends have voted on.

These are listed now on the revised page on GovTrack.

OpenCongress also has which is similar to the above two (and OpenCongress is also based on GovTrack data).

In March and April we ran an experiment to see if citizens could come together to write a “group letter” to Congress. Yesterday I took a trip down to Capitol Hill to deliver the letter to Members of Congress. Read it all..

Recently the Senate decided to update its website so that it shares roll call vote data with other websites, like GovTrack, in a more technologically friendly way. I’ve been pushing this for the past couple of years, along with others, and it’s great news to finally see this change. Read on for more and other recent press coverage. Read it all..

Filibusted.us is, no doubt about it, a very good site that helps shed light on how the filibuster and cloture vote are playing out in the Senate. Except, this is a very complicated topic:

That’s the strict reading of what is going on. I don’t think that’s the fairest explanation. Rather, I would say that the cloture vote has become a part of the standing conventions

of the Senate to pass a bill. What I mean is, probably no one thinks of it as gaming the system anymore. Instead, the cloture vote has taken the place of the final vote as the meaningful vote when passing a bill. Bills actually require a 2/3rds majority to pass now, period. When someone votes against cloture, it’s not necessarily a sinister act of gaming the system nor is it that they are necessarily trying to obstruct progress. It’s just how things work- if you oppose the bill, you vote against it (at cloture), and that’s the end of the story.

Not everyone who opposes a bill votes against cloture, though, so to some it must still feel

like gaming the system. These folks allow an up-or-down vote knowing that they are going to lose and the bill will pass. They give up their opportunity to kill a bill, knowing that the intention of Senate rules was to use a simple majority. These folks are noble, but perhaps misguided about what a cloture vote means now.

I don’t think it’s such a big deal if the Senate actually requires a 2/3rds majority. Lots of people seem to think that a simple majority vote is always the most fair/ethical/moral way to decide something (one person one vote), but I think this view is greatly mistaken. But this is a fair question to ask: should the Senate vote on bills by simple majority or 2/3rds? Senators are likely to waver depending on whether they are in the majority or minority party at any given time, and this is unfortunate.

If the Senate thinks a 2/3rds majority is a fine way to decide on bills, then that’s fine. We should just be transparent and honest about the process. Let’s get rid of the cloture vote, which is highly confusing for the American public, and change the fiinal vote to require a 2/3rds majority. But if Senators think a simple majority is appropriate, then the filibustering and cloture process ought to be revised so that it can’t be gamed by a bill’s opponents so easily.

Our experiment in creating a group letter to Congress

opposing HR 45, a gun control bill, is nearing its final stage, and I’ve been very impressed with the process. (I announced the experiment in March.) Plus we’re starting up two more letters. Read on for how to sign on to the letter, and for more. Read it all..

Here are a few changes that happened on GovTrack recently: Social Action links, subject terms update, Leader-Follower scores for representatives, searching by sponsorship in archival data, more maps widgets, and a new Developers section. Read on for more. Read it all..

Last week GovTrack launched an experiment using , the collaborative writing tool, to see how members of the GovTrack community could come together to write a joint letter to congressmen. A large problem facing Congress is their inability to keep up with constituent communication, as the rise of electronic communications to Congress has far outpaced the increases in their office budgets. One of the many ways to address this problem is to have constituents come together on a single letter, an aggregated communication. Petitions were the aggregated letter of the past. In the future, we will see the letter actually being written collaboratively, and this is what GovTrack’s first-of-its-kind experiment is about. Read it all..