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

About a month ago I started a . With a $100 prize at stake, about a dozen people submitted ideas — three submitted shirt-ready images. Congrats to who stole the prize for his satirical design:

I Know What You Did Last Session

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

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

Thanks to all of the submitters!

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 . 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.

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:

• 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

  .

• 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..

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..

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..

This past weekend was very busy for me. I gave two presentations on the Hill about how GovTrack can be useful for staffers for Members of Congress. Some notes are

. After that I gave presentations to a diverse group during a conference on and on

.