Credits

A number of acknowledgements are due. Below you'll find intellectual, informational, and software credits.

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 (one of my college classmates) Joseph Barillari. 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:

• The Library of Congress and the Congressional Research Service via THOMAS for the status legislation, subject terms of bills, and bill summaries, and upcoming House committee meetings.
• The House of Representatives and the Senate for information on Members of Congress, committee membership, voting records, and upcoming committee meetings.
• The Government Printing Office for photos of members of congress and the text of legislation.
• The Office of Management and Budget (OMB) (executive branch) and Congressional Budget Office (CBO) (legislative branch) for reports related to bills.
• The Congressional Biographical Directory and the independent Congressional Committees, Historical Standing Committees data set by Garrison Nelson and Charles Stewart for biographical and historical information on members of Congress, including congressional district assignments.
• The Census Bureau for geographic data on congressional district and municipal boundaries.

And these independent sources:

• Technorati for the hot legislation list on the Research Congress page.
• 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:

• Mono, the open-source .NET
• The GD drawing library for various images
• DotLucene (Jakarta Lucene ported to C#) for searching bills and the congressional record
• Doug Rhode's SVD C Library to perform the mathematical analysis for the political spectrum
• Michael Gastner's cartogram program for creating cartogram maps of voting records.
• Autosuggest / Autocomplete with Ajax v. 2.0

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!)