As the northeast gets blasted with snow — here in Philadelphia we’re on our third storm in two weeks — I’ve got a few new updates for GovTrack.

• Last month GovTrack Insider launched and it’s now getting integrated with GovTrack. The new site has reporting on what congressional committees are meeting about and other legislative analysis. If you are tracking legislation with GovTrack, when there’s a relevant GovTrack Insider article you’ll see an event in your feed. Plus, the Insider headlines are now featured on GovTrack’s homepage.
• The Research and especially Legislation pages have new “Popular Bills” lists. You can now see what bills people are searching for most and what search terms they are using. This way, if you’re not sure what bill you’re looking for you can get some short descriptions. No one has tried this before for bills, so we’ll have to see how it works out and tweak it in the future.
• If you’re tracking committee meetings, they now show up dated by when the meeting was posted (well, found by GovTrack) rather than with the date of the meeting. The reason we made this change is that if you really are tracking these meetings, you don’t want to keep seeing the same events a month in the future until they occur. We think you want to see them as soon as they’re posted, and then they’ll fade away as newer things come up. If also means if you get these events by email, you won’t get multiple emails for the same meetings over and over again. If you still want a calendar-oriented format, you can now get an actual calendar from the Committees page. And the feed page still links to an iCal feed which you can use in calendaring applications (including Google Calendar).

And that’s it for now.

This week we had a technical glitch that caused every bill to show up with no cosponsors. This should now be corrected.

As you may know, GovTrack derives its information from THOMAS, the website of the Library of Congress. Unfortunately, the Library of Congress does not publish legislative information in a way that makes it possible to accurately reuse the information on independent websites like GovTrack. I’ve spoken with them a number of times about it over the past 5 years, I’ve gotten legislation passed about it, but until they embrace the value of legislative data for the public this is the best anyone can do.

So what happens is that small changes to  THOMAS can break our data import until we notice and fix it. That’s what happened this week.

Everything should be back to normal now. Thanks for your patience.

Here’s an update to what’s new on GovTrack over the last few months.

• You’ll now notice little buttons throughout the site that let you add or remove trackers when you see lists of bills, rather than having to click through to the individual bills.
• The bill search page now lets you search bills by references (i.e. citations) to the United States Code.
• You can now search GovTrack for historical Members of Congress and can browse Members of Congress by year.
• We’ve improved the way we notice changes to bill status so that the automatic processes that make GovTrack go keep the site better up to made.
• The images that go along with roll call votes have been made to look just a bit nicer.
• The congressional district maps can now be expanded into a full screen mode.
• When you are tracking individual bills, you’ll now get updates when cosponsorship changes.
• Logging into GovTrack was totally broken if you entered your email address with any capital letters. This is fixed now. Oops.

For developers reusing GovTrack data for other projects:

• We’ve now got MODS files for bill text from the GPO, which, among other things, includes the dates bill texts were published (something annoyingly missing up till now).
• I’ve been filling in the “class” field for Senators. This determines which election cycles each senator is in, and when one senator replaces another you should trace it back through the same “class”. I haven’t checked it carefully for accuracy yet. Additionally, we now have two people.xml files, one for current Members of Congress and one for the historical data that has everyone that has ever served in Congress.
• Bill XML files now have some new experimental status codes that more precisely reflect where a bill is in the legislative process.

Donny Shaw over at OpenCongress says that House Republicans are explaining their views on the health care bill by linking people directly to the paragraphs in the bills they find important. I think that’s great. They may be using OpenCongress, but we invented that feature over here on GovTrack — OpenCongress is based on GovTrack — so we’ll take some pride and credit too.

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A Clockwork Orange move Here’s what Donny wrote:

Here’s a great example of the kind of textually-informed conversations about bills we have been trying to encourage. Republicans in the House of Representatives are extracting chunks of legislative text from the OpenCongress health care bill page (H.R. 3962), giving their take and opening them up for discussion. They’re using OpenCongress’ bill text permalinking tool to refer people back to the specific lines of text in the 1,990 page bill that they’re talking about.Check it out — House Republicans Read the Bill>>

They’re using a service called Amplify that lets you “clip, share and discuss interesting things you read on the web.” It integrates with Twitter, Facebook and other social networking sites.

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I just set up an account quickly and was able to leave a comment on one of Rep. Lynn Jenkins’ [R, KS-2]

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posts. Then I was able to easily share the post on Twitter Total Recall psp . The whole process is open, transparent and social.

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Having the links back to the exact portion of the bill under discussion make it engaging. It’s easy to be disingenuous about legislation by making a false claim and backing it up with a line of text taken out of context. That’s basically how the “death panel” myth was spread over the summer. But providing a link to the specific line within the bill invites people to look it up for themselves, read it in context and make their own judgement.

Anyways, go check it out

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. They’re putting up several new posts per hour.

I’m a wonk, you’re a wonk. We like reading legislation and we’re proud of it. Strut your stuff with GovTrack’s new merchandise.

About a month ago I started a t-shirt design contest. With a $100 prize at stake, about a dozen people submitted ideas — three submitted shirt-ready images. Congrats to Matt Pentifallo The Last Resort on dvd who stole the prize for his satirical design:

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(For the older readers, this is a reference to a horror movie.)

Ben Rellick submitted some new logo images, based on the site’s current logo. In appreciation, I decided post-hoc to add a runner-up prize of $60 for Ben. Ben’s submissions are on t-shirts and a mouse pad. Here’s the mouse pad:

GovTrack Logo Mouse Pad

Finally, Susie Holderfield submitted a cute red G with an eye inside, which I turned into a mug:

Red G Mug

Thanks to all of the submitters!

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I also added a design myself. It’s an image of a bill, the House’s health care bill, and on the back is the page with the supposed dead panels, which are clearly not mentioned on that page.

The merchandise is now available The Alphabet Killer movie download . It’s all created, managed, and shipped through a third-party website that does this sort of stuff — Zazzle.com. I just upload the designs.

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Now, I didn’t do this to make money so all of the merchandise are available at the lowest rate that Zazzle.com will let me sell them for. But, people have asked me how to donate to GovTrack and I’ve always declined donations in the past (GovTrack is NOT an actual non-profit charitable organization), but if you want to support the site, you can also buy the same merchandise at a marked-up price. You choose.

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 Community Q&A 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 our recommendation. No sooner did we recommend #usbill that people started tweeting with it

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• Pages for bills now show industry supporters and opponents thanks to MAPLight.org, 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 Filibusted.us which has more information on the issue of filibusters.
• You can now jump to a congressional distristrct by entering a street address, 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.

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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..

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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.

RepresentedBy

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, by Will Turnage, 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 Sunlight’s Apps for America Contest (1).

Laws I Like, 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.

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These are listed now on the revised Tools page on GovTrack.

OpenCongress also has a Facebook app 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..