GovTrack.us

 

Credits

So many acknowledgements are due!

Intellectual Acknowledgements

Other sites that have inspired various things you see here. GovTrack was initially inspired by Project Vote Smart, OpenSecrets and the commercial CapWiz.

Ideas for several components of the site have been derived from elsewhere: RichmondSunlight for how the status of legislation is displayed on bill pages, and WashingtonWatch for showing costs-per-taxpayer of legislation, and OpenCongress for the crowd-sourcing of related legislation. The Leader-Follower scores are based on an idea by Joseph Barillari (one of my college classmates). I'm sure I have drawn ideas from many other places as well.

(Interestingly, some credit was due to the government's Orwellian but fortunately dead-before-it-started Total Information Awareness project, which inspired the short-lived MIT media lab project Government Information Awareness, which in turn provided the initial database of legislators used here.)

Financial Acknowledgements

Though the site is primarily self-funded through the advertising (more on the advertising), and through the contributions in time of those who have worked on the site, a small part of the development of the site has been externally funded.

The interactivity on the bill text pages was developed by Kevin Henry supported by a grant from the Sunlight Foundation. Thanks, Sunlight!

Informational Acknowledgements

Data on the site comes from these official (government) sources:

And these independent sources:

  • For roll call vote data and some district numbers from the 1st to 100th Congresses: Rosenthal, Howard L., and Keith T. Poole. United States Congressional Roll Call Voting Records, 1789-1990. Pittsburgh, PA: Keith T. Poole, Carnegie Mellon University, Graduate School of Industrial Administration, 1991.
  • For political party affiliation for Members of Congress from 1789 through about year 2000, Martis's "The Historical Atlas of Political Parties in the United States Congress" via Keith Poole's roll call votes data set.
  • Project Vote Smart for their bill highlights.
  • public.resource.org and watchdog.net for the ZIP+4-to-congressional-district database.
  • The Cornell University Legal Information Institute for the text of the United States Code in the "law in context" pop-ups in bill text.
  • I've supplemented some biographical information on Members of Congress from the Sunlight Labs API.

Software Acknowledgements

GovTrack wouldn't be fiscally possible without the many open source projects that have developed software powering this site, including especially:

Thanks to all of the people that made these open source tools available.

The server powering this site is located at Rimuhosting. (I don't get any special treatment from them, but they have been very good so I thought a link would be nice!)