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Analysis and Commentary – Legislative Recap – Legislative Preview – News About GovTrack – Using GovTrack Tips

GovTrack Marks Two Decades of Tracking Congress

Oct 18, 2024 · News About GovTrack · by Joshua Tauberer

We know more today about what the U.S. Congress is doing, both the good and the bad, than ever before. That doesn’t mean Congress has become perfect. Transparency gives us an opportunity to hold powerful people and institutions accountable, but we have to use it. This week you’re hearing from ...

We retracted our single-year legislator report cards after warning about their unreliability

Jul 26, 2024 · News About GovTrack · by Joshua Tauberer

Here's the short version: We retracted the legislator rankings that we published for 2013, 2015, 2017, and 2019 including a ranking of then-Senator Kamala Harris as the most liberal senator in 2019. A newer ranking that we published in 2021 says she was the leftmost Democratic senator. Catch the difference? ...

Ask Us Anything, and a GovTrack Survey

May 25, 2024 · News About GovTrack · by Joshua Tauberer

Have you noticed that we use a lot of jargon? Sometimes we get caught up in what we're reporting on and forget to explain what we're talking about. Here's a chance to tell us if we dropped the ball in explaining something about Congress, or what else you want to ...

Paused for peace

Sep 28, 2020 · News About GovTrack

Following the death of Justice Gingburg and the rapid escalation that night of political rhetoric over the filling of her seat on the Supreme Court, we paused our regular postings to Twitter and Instagram on the basis that we didn’t have much to contribute to the already overwhelming echo chamber. ...

GovTrack’s recommendations to the House Ethics Committee regarding conflicts of interest and Members of the House holding outside positions

Jul 16, 2019 · News About GovTrack

“Ethics” by masondan is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 _We submitted the following letter to the House Committee on Ethics last week in response to __their call for comments__ on upcoming revisions the Committee will be making to the House of Representative’s ethics rules._ H.Res. 6 created ...

GovTrack testimony in House committee hearing on transparency and modernizing Congress

May 10, 2019 · News About GovTrack

GovTrack founder Joshua Tauberer (right) testifies before the House Select Committee on the Modernization of Congress. Photo via Alex Howard. https://twitter.com/digiphile/status/1126856099133632513 This morning GovTrack.us founder Joshua Tauberer testified before the House Select Committee on the Modernization of Congress on the subject of transparency. This is a new committee which ...

Introducing GovTrack’s Congressional Misconduct Database

Feb 6, 2018 · News About GovTrack

We chronicled 372 allegations of misconduct from 1789 to today. Today we introduce our full Congressional Misconduct Database containing 372 instances of misconduct and alleged misconduct by Members of the United States Congress from 1789 to the present. https://www.govtrack.us/misconduct So what is in the database? Lots. It is ...

Site Updates in 2017

Dec 12, 2017 · News About GovTrack · by Jesse Rifkin

Hi everyone! Your GovTrackers Jesse, Amy, Ben, and Josh have been busy since our last update in 2016 adding new information and functionality to the site. Here’s what’s new in 2017. Check it out! ## New Legislative Information on GovTrack ### Misconduct Database Just last week we launched a new ...

Our first diversity report

Oct 19, 2017 · News About GovTrack

We’re calling on other civic technology organizations to join us. Over the last few years major technology companies including Facebook, Apple, and AT&T have begun publishing an annual “diversity report” that includes the proportion of their employees who are women and people of color. The reports have become an ...

2017 Backer Update

Jul 30, 2017 · News About GovTrack

Thank you to our users for the incredible support you have given us. For those that have supported us on Patreon or by hiding the advertisements, your support does not only benefit the GovTrack team, but also the millions of Americans who uses the site to stay informed. We ...

Our testimony to the House of Representatives on public access to legislative information

Apr 30, 2017 · News About GovTrack

Tracking changes to the American Health Care Act (AHCA)

Mar 14, 2017 · News About GovTrack

Last week the House Republican leadership unveiled a draft proposal to, as they call it, “repeal and replace” the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare). As with all legislation in Congress, drafts are often amended on their way to becoming law — the AHCA is no different. As the draft works ...

How a complex network of bills becomes a law: Introducing a new data analysis of text incorporation!

Jan 7, 2017 · News About GovTrack

A new analysis we incorporated into GovTrack late last year reveals when provisions of bills are incorporated into other bills. Our new tool will reveal much more about what Congress is doing, and what laws are being made, than has ever been known to the general public. For the complete ...

How a complex network of bills becomes a law: Introducing a new data analysis of text incorporation!

Jan 7, 2017 · News About GovTrack

Provisions from 15 separate bills were merged into two bills that Congress ultimately enacted. A new analysis we incorporated into GovTrack late last year reveals when provisions of bills are incorporated into other bills. Our new tool will reveal much more about what Congress is doing, and what laws are ...

Ending GovTrack’s bulk data and API

Dec 10, 2016 · News About GovTrack

Open legislative data has been a core part of GovTrack’s mission since 2005, when there wasn’t very much of it. We were the first to provide comprehensive information about Congress’s legislative activities in an open, structured data format — a technical format that software developers (building websites and apps), journalists, ...

GovTrack Site Updates in 2016

Nov 26, 2016 · News About GovTrack · by Jesse Rifkin

This past year was a busy year for us. We’ve made many improvements throughout the site and thanks to users like you we’ll be able to keep the site going into 2017. ## You helped us increase our budget Thanks to users like you who are supporting us

Creating congressional district maps with Mapbox

Sep 20, 2016 · News About GovTrack

By Aaron Dennis and Joshua Tauberer. Originally published on Sunlight Foundation’s OpenGov Voices blog on July 6, 2016. Every 10 years — after the decennial census and as mandated by the U.S. Constitution — states are subdivided into sets of congressional districts for representation in the U.S. House of Representatives. ...

GovTrack Updates for Spring/Summer 2015

Oct 4, 2015 · News About GovTrack

Here’s what’s new on GovTrack this Spring & Summer: ### GovTrack Insider After running a summer-long experiment with intern Ben, we successfully funded the launch of GovTrack Insider, where we’ll be posting in-depth articles on bills in Congress and major Congressional activity. GovTrack Insider is made possible by the generous ...

Users report GovTrack makes them more confident about approaching government

Aug 28, 2015 · News About GovTrack

This summer GovTrack ran a survey of its users to learn more about the site’s effectiveness. The survey, run in collaboration with mySociety, revealed something pretty interesting: As peope use GovTrack more, they report GovTrack giving them greater confidence when approaching government. Here are some of the details. ## Who ...

Discontinuing state-level legislative tracking

Aug 11, 2015 · News About GovTrack

Today I’m turning the lights off on GovTrack’s state-level legislative tracking pages. I added state-level legislative tracking in 2012, through a partnership with LegiNation, Inc. and LegiScan, Inc., with some additional data from Open States. This meant you could get email updates on bills going through your state legislature, besides ...

Continuing GovTrack Insider

Aug 3, 2015 · News About GovTrack

Continuing GovTrack Insider Hello, Thank you for reading GovTrack Insider! As you know, for the past two months we’ve been writing reports on the activity of Congress as well as summaries of bills, all to make it as easy as possible for readers like you to stay informed about your ...

Funding GovTrack Insider

Jul 28, 2015 · News About GovTrack

Like these reports? Help us to keep writing them by backing our project. https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1872382405/govtrack-insider If we can reach our goal of $35,000 we’ll be able to keep posting bill summaries and daily reports for the next 6 months, which we began doing earlier this summer. And at our stretch goal ...

Launching GovTrack Insider

Jun 24, 2015 · News About GovTrack

Legislative data is only the beginning to understanding what Congress does and how it works. That’s why earlier this month GovTrack.us launched GovTrack Insider, a blog on Medium covering Congress’s daily activities. Each post on GovTrack Insider summarizes recent major legislative activity that would be hard ...

2010 — Launching the first GovTrack Insider

May 7, 2015 · News About GovTrack

2010 — Launching the first GovTrack Insider — This post was originally published on Sunday, January 24th, 2010 with the launch of the first incarnation of GovTrack Insider, which published 30 articles over the course of a year. — Last week I launched GovTrack Insider, a spin-off of GovTrack.us ...

GovTrack’s Summer/Fall Updates

Dec 18, 2014 · News About GovTrack

Here’s what’s been improved on GovTrack in the summer and fall of this year. * Permalinks to individual paragraphs in bill text is now provided (example). * We now ask for your congressional district so that we can customize vote and bill pages to show how your ...

An apology regarding our email updates

Aug 2, 2014 · News About GovTrack

Our email updates were incomplete over the last six weeks. We sent the following in an email to affected users today. You may have noticed that you were not getting all of the GovTrack email updates that you signed up for. Starting in mid-June and until earlier this week ...

Welcome user #300,000

Jun 12, 2014 · News About GovTrack

At 6:44 p.m. tonight our 300,000th registered user signed up! This post is just a quick victory lap. GovTrack launched in September 2004, almost ten years ago, and is now used by millions of people — 7,255,163 in the last year (most don’t register, of course) — to figure out ...

GovTrack’s Winter/Spring Updates

May 12, 2014 · News About GovTrack

Here’s what new on GovTrack since December… We’ve made the bill pages a little more friendly (example): * Bill status & progress is now explained through icons. * The sponsor of each bill now includes a big photo. * There’s also a preview thumbnail of the bill’s text. * And ...

The Congressional Data Coalition writes to House Appropriators

Mar 8, 2014 · News About GovTrack

Update 5/2/2014: We sent a similar letter to Senate appropriators today. See Daniel’s post about it. Update 4/9/2014: The House Appropriations committee accepted our request. In their report for the FY 2015 legislative branch appropriations bill: > > The Committee request that the Clerk of the House, the Librarian of ...

2013 Report Cards for All Members of Congress

Jan 8, 2014 · News About GovTrack

We’ve calculated some new statistics! Sen. David Vitter wrote the most bills in 2013. Rep. Pete Sessions got the most bills out of committee in the House. Rep. Barbara Lee was the most liberal representative. And our transparency heroes for 2013 were Rep. Darrell Issa and Rep. Elijah Cummings. These ...

Closing Out 2013 With Policy Unfinished [Update #3]

Dec 18, 2013 · News About GovTrack

As the 2013 session of the 113th Congress comes to a close, everyone wants to know just how bad was it? Pretty bad indeed. With 72 new laws enacted in this session, it is the lowest in any first year of a Congress at least since 1973, which is the ...

Fall 2013 Updates to GovTrack

Dec 12, 2013 · News About GovTrack

This fall brings a number of updates to GovTrack including a new Call Congress advocacy tool and improved display of bill text. Read on for details! Call Congress Earlier in the fall we announced that you can now use GovTrack to call your representative about a bill. You’ll find a ...

Bringing bill text into the 21st Century

Dec 10, 2013 · News About GovTrack

Dealing with bill text has always been a complex and complicated task. It took upwards of 200 years for Congress to standardize to the language and terminology it uses in the text of bills and resolutions today, and it took until just the last few years for Congress to make ...

New: Use GovTrack to Call Congress

Oct 31, 2013 · News About GovTrack

Petitioning our government is not only a right but a responsibility. Now on GovTrack we’ll walk you through how to call Congress about bills you have an opinion on. Look for the new “Call Congress!” buttons on all bill pages on GovTrack. When you click Call Congress, we’ll ask if ...

Legislative status during the shutdown

Oct 1, 2013 · News About GovTrack

Since we don’t know how long the federal government shutdown will last, here’s a brief run-down of how the shutdown will affect GovTrack: * We’re not a government website, as you hopefully know, so we’re still operating. * We get our bill status information from THOMAS.gov, which is run by ...

An update on getting legislative data from the House

Sep 25, 2013 · News About GovTrack

For more than a decade I’ve been prodding Congress to publish something as simple as a spreadsheet of bills in Congress. They have pretty websites listing bills like Congress.gov, yes, but if you want to do data analysis like we do, what you need is a spreadsheet. But we’re not ...

Where’s the data, Boehner?

Aug 16, 2013 · News About GovTrack

No legislative branch agency makes available a spreadsheet that lists every bill introduced in Congress. How can there be meaningful transparency if the public cannot get a simple list of bills? Yesterday I called on Speaker Boehner and Majority Leader Cantor to fix this problem (read the letter). They promised ...

Summer 2013 Updates

Aug 12, 2013 · News About GovTrack

You asked for widgets, better accessibility, and improvements to email updates, and you got it. Here’s how we’ve improved GovTrack since the last update: Major Updates Our blog post and video Lawmakers Who Aren’t Making Law got national media coverage on The McLaughlin Group (at 22:20). Thanks to GovTrack’s director ...

Civic data to inspire: the Girl emPower iPad app

Jul 1, 2013 · News About GovTrack

_We’re proud to see GovTrack’s database put to use to by others to empower individuals. In this guest post, Andrew Cavanagh describes the iPad app he created with Laura Phelps called Girl emPower, which you can find on the Apple app store here. Thanks to Andrew and Laura for letting ...

Spring 2013 Updates

May 27, 2013 · News About GovTrack

Since the last update, here’s what we’ve been working on. We fixed some major features that hadn’t been working since the start of the 113th Congress in January: * Committee meetings are now being tracked again. You can add a committee meeting tracker to your feeds and get email updates ...

The U.S. House holds transparency conference, says access to law must be free

May 24, 2013 · News About GovTrack

This year the U.S. House has continued on its path toward greater transparency, and this week in particular two developments are worth noting: The House’s committee on House Administration held its second annual Legislative Data and Transparency Conference, and they rebuked a report that suggested it was OK for the ...

How Members of Congress Use GovTrack

May 2, 2013 · News About GovTrack

Members of Congress nowadays use numerous tools to inform the voting public about their opinions and activities. They tweet, post on Facebook, and send email updates. And they also use GovTrack, in a variety of ways. Some Members take advantage of the feeds our site offers, and embed them as ...

Winter 2013 Updates 2

Mar 31, 2013 · News About GovTrack

Here’s a list of some of the recent improvements to GovTrack. * We started writing original summaries of select bills. Read them all here. * __Vice presidents__ now have pages on GovTrack. Remember that they cast tie-breaking votes in the Senate, like in this one. Tie-breaking votes now indicate which ...

Update: Adding Bill Summaries

Mar 5, 2013 · News About GovTrack

Last month we began adding original summaries of select legislation introduced in this Congress. Civic engagement in the legislative process requires not only that the public have access to legislation proposed in Congress, but also that they be able to understand it. However, bills can be extremely long and often ...

Winter 2013 Updates 1

Feb 9, 2013 · News About GovTrack

We’ve added historical information on bills from 1951-1978 and made some other improvements to the site recently. Here are the details: * Using the Statutes at Large, the compilation of laws enacted by Congress, we’ve added enacted bills from 1951-1972 into GovTrack. For example, here’s Civil Rights Act of 1964 ...

Our Analysis Methodology: Technical Details

Jan 13, 2013 · News About GovTrack

We’ve added a new Analysis Methodology page. This page provides details on our ideology, leadership, and prognosis analyses so that they can be understood better by our users and so they can be replicated by researchers in other domains. GovTrack pioneered three large-scale (i.e. BigData) statistical analyses of ...

Welcome to the 113th Congress

Jan 4, 2013 · News About GovTrack

Yesterday the 113th Congress was sworn in and began filing bills. Here’s how that affects GovTrack and other updates to the site this week. For the 113th Congress: * We updated our roster of Members of Congress and maps. * New bills and votes began showing up on ...

Bill prognosis gets a few improvements

Dec 7, 2012 · News About GovTrack

Back in April we introduced “bill prognosis” (original post), a statistical analysis of how likely bills are to be enacted. Today we’re making a few improvements. Read on for more about it. For each bill (example: S. 3637), we compute a probability that the bill will be enacted ...

Site Updates – Fall 2012

Nov 25, 2012 · News About GovTrack

From a new start page to improved maps, here’s what we’ve been working on this fall: There is a new Start page to find something to track and get email updates for, and you can now get email updates on full text keyword searches. So if you want to track ...

The math behind some of our stats

Oct 16, 2012 · News About GovTrack

If you’re interested in the math behind some of our statistics — the ideology/leadership charts and the bill prognosis scores — you might find interesting a talk I gave last week. I had the opportunity to kick off the application development track at the Law Via the Internet (LVI) 2012 ...

Summer 2012 Updates #2: August Edition

Aug 28, 2012 · News About GovTrack

We’ve added a few great new search features to GovTrack, as well as other improvements. Check them out: * __Find Similar Bills__: There are often multiple bills introduced on a topic and major changes to bills are sometimes introduced as entirely new bills. These related bills can be hard to ...

Site Updates – Summer 2012 #1

Jul 29, 2012 · News About GovTrack

Busy as always, we’ve got some more new things on GovTrack this month: * Congressional District Maps now include redistricting maps for the upcoming elections. Except for Rhode Island — we’re still working on locating the new districts there. You can switch back and forth between your current district and ...

Data license changes, take two

Jul 19, 2012 · News About GovTrack

Last post I wrote that I’d be changing the data licensing terms on GovTrack. I sincerely asked for feedback, and I got it. Gunnar, for instance, rightly pointed out that this isn’t everyone’s fight. He also noted that my dry sense of humor wasn’t really working. The change I planned ...

Data license terms to change in response to Netroots conference boycott of nonpartisan tool NationBuilder

Jul 12, 2012 · News About GovTrack

I sent the following message out to the GovTrack data developers mail list. It affects anyone who uses GovTrack’s bulk raw data downloads and API. Dear data re-users, This is advanced notice that on July 20 I’ll be revising the terms of GovTrack’s generic license agreement by adding the following ...

Site Updates: Spring 2012

Jun 24, 2012 · News About GovTrack

A lot’s been happening here at GovTrack over the last few months. Here’s a quick run-down of the most recent changes: * If you use GovTrack to build lists of items to track, the Your Lists page has gotten a much needed visual refresh. It also now provides __RSS feed ...

Welcoming the 50 States to GovTrack

Jun 19, 2012 · News About GovTrack

If tracking one Congress was great, then tracking 51 of them must be even better! This week GovTrack added legislative tracking for the 50 states. You can now find: * 50-State Bill Search (searching titles and summaries) * State bill status, such as for Indiana SCR0005: Health Insurance Exchanges – ...

Rep. Crenshaw backs down, loses control over bulk data issue

Jun 7, 2012 · News About GovTrack

UPDATE: The Washington Post covered this story online on June 8, and on the front page in print on June 9. The government data that makes GovTrack go has been the center of what looks like a failed political power play over the last week. Rep. Crenshaw, whose appropriations subcommittee ...

Rep. Crenshaw thinks American public can’t be trusted with overseeing Congress

Jun 4, 2012 · News About GovTrack

UPDATE: See how this issue resolved. Rep. Ander Crenshaw (FL4) and the House subcommittee he chairs decided this week that the American public can’t be trusted with more thorough records about what Congress is doing. __/// Take Action: Write your rep to oppose Crenshaw’s report. /// Start ...

New: Legislation Coming Up

May 12, 2012 · News About GovTrack

It used to be that us outsiders never exactly knew when a bill was going to come up for a vote. But thanks to recent developments in the House we can be more involved in the legislative process in the crucial days before a bill comes to a vote. GovTrack’s ...

New: Faceted Bill Search

May 6, 2012 · News About GovTrack

One of my own favorite new parts of GovTrack 2.0 is the advanced bill search, which you can find in Browse => Bills => Search & Track => Advanced Search. The advanced search — or in technical jargon the “faceted” search — can be used to drill-down into all of ...

Even Better Bill Prognosis: Now with Real Probabilities

Apr 8, 2012 · News About GovTrack

Bill prognosis has gotten an upgrade. A few weeks ago I wrote about a new addition to GovTrack, the bill prognosis, and because it proved to be useful I expanded on it to provide a more detailed and numerical assessment of the future of each bill. For an example, check ...

New on GovTrack: Bill Prognosis

Mar 24, 2012 · News About GovTrack

Only a small fraction of the bills and resolutions introduced will ever be voted on. How do you know which bills to pay attention to? Now on GovTrack you can find a bill’s prognosis. We can’t predict the future, but we can highlight factors that favor a bill’s progress. Check ...

We’ve made a few “tweaks” to GovTrack

Mar 19, 2012 · News About GovTrack

Welcome to the start of GovTrack 2.0! This past weekend I replaced the site with a completely new GovTrack that lays the groundwork for many more years of innovation in legislative tracking. Let me get out of the way that there are some things missing from GovTrack 2.0 that were ...

GovTrack users want better transparency from Congress

Mar 16, 2012 · News About GovTrack

It is time for the Library of Congress to modernize the way they disseminate legislative information to the public, and GovTrack users are standing up to a call to push Congress to make this happen. I asked my users here whether they would sign on to a letter to Congress ...

Tune in to WAMU 88.5 at noon

Sep 13, 2011 · News About GovTrack

I’ll be on the Kojo Nnamdi show at noon today, which is on WAMU 88.5 in the DC area, and I think you can also listen online.

Check out the new colors

Jul 22, 2011 · News About GovTrack

In January I decided to start over. GovTrack has been doing well since it launched almost seven years ago, but the site has gotten to be such a mess in its internals that I haven’t been able to create new cool things for a long time. At the start of ...

Numerical methods for determining leadership and ideology in Congress

Dec 26, 2010 · News About GovTrack

Today I am publishing two new types of statistics for understanding the behavioral relationships between Members of Congress. The first is a new approach to the leader-follower scores, based on the same algorithm Google uses to rank pages on the web. The second statistic is an update to ...

Summer Citizen Reporter Contest

Jul 6, 2010 · News About GovTrack

Although I’m a programmer, I also consider myself a journalist. GovTrack reports on what is happening in Congress day by day — even if the reporting is just a nice presentation of a lot of raw, unedited facts about legislation. But I often lament the lack of a human touch, ...

GovTrack On The Go (For Android Phones)

Jun 15, 2010 · News About GovTrack

If you’re a mobile wonk, you’ll be interested to know about the new Congress app which lets you browse bill status from your Android phone. Built by the Sunlight Foundation () and based on GovTrack’s legislative database, the free app is constantly being improved and is very cool. Search for ...

Winter Weather Updates

Feb 10, 2010 · News About GovTrack

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 launched and it’s now getting integrated with GovTrack. The new site has reporting on what congressional committees are meeting ...

Cosponsors disappeared! (They’re back now.)

Jan 8, 2010 · News About GovTrack

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

What’s new to GovTrack this fall

Dec 8, 2009 · News About GovTrack

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 ...

House Republicans Use GovTrack to Read the Bill

Nov 3, 2009 · News About GovTrack

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 — ...

GovTrack Merchandise

Oct 15, 2009 · News About GovTrack

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 ...

Design a GovTrack t-shirt, win $100

Sep 19, 2009 · News About GovTrack

Hey, we need some cool GovTrack apparel, right? Design a GovTrack t-shirt or send me a funny expression related to GovTrack to put on a t-shirt, and if I get some good responses I’ll pick a winner and send back a $100 gift certificate to somewhere. Email your submissions to ...

Summer Site Updates

Aug 22, 2009 · News About GovTrack

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 ...

Downtime coming up

Aug 11, 2009 · News About GovTrack

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.You may have noticed that last month especially as the health care reform bill was being debated, GovTrack had ...

Our first tweet, and a preview of our latest experiment

Jun 29, 2009 · News About GovTrack

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.) ...

Two Facebook Apps Based on GovTrack

Jun 13, 2009 · News About GovTrack

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 ...

Delivering the H.R. 45 “Group Letter”

May 22, 2009 · News About GovTrack

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. Our first experiment with group writing resulted in opposing collaboratively ...

Upgrading Senate technology and other recent press

May 11, 2009 · News About GovTrack

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 ...

Filibusted.us: Check out who is stalling Senate action

May 6, 2009 · News About GovTrack

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. ...

Collaborative Letter Update

May 2, 2009 · News About GovTrack

Site Updates

Apr 6, 2009 · News About GovTrack

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. Subject Terms : At the start of the year the Congressional ...

MixedInk experiment: A collaborative letter to Congress on H.R. 45

Mar 16, 2009 · News About GovTrack

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 ...

Track your representative’s YouTube videos

Jan 13, 2009 · News About GovTrack

You may have seen the new YouTube channels for the House and Senate and the kind of intro from our congressional leaders, which Sunlight’s . Basically, Congress has entered the 21st century (finally) by starting to communicate with their constituents using video, which is fantastic news. You can ...

Site Updates in September, December 2008

Dec 20, 2008 · News About GovTrack

As GovTrack continues its fifth year and we head into the new session of Congress starting in 2009, we have a bunch of new site updates to share. Here are the major improvements made to the site this fall, some in the last few weeks: Bill Text The <a ...

GovTrack hits 50,000 registered users

Nov 1, 2008 · News About GovTrack

We’ve hit the 50,000 mark, the number of people that have created an account on the site to configure their trackers and get email updates. More updates coming in a few weeks.

Welcome to GovTrack’s Fourth Year

Sep 9, 2008 · News About GovTrack

. (Thanks to for the data!) I have written a page on Tips for Commnicating With Congress . Should you write your rep? What should you include? Take a look. now include some cute pie charts , and, also, the time of day ...

Questions and Answers: Your questions, your answers!

Jul 6, 2008 · News About GovTrack

Last week I added a new feature to GovTrack called Community Q&A. It was inspired by a question I received by mail (the subject of my last blog post). If one person that has a question actually took the time to email, then there must be hundreds of other questions ...

See you on the flip side of winter recess

Dec 21, 2007 · News About GovTrack

Congress is on break until mid January, so we’ll be going into a bit of hibernation here at GovTrack. Check back when Congress resumes mid January for the new GovTrack Community Blog , legislative analysis written by and for the users of this site. Also, a quick plug for , ...

Second Call for Bloggers

Nov 27, 2007 · News About GovTrack

I received a few encouraging replies to an earlier post about you blogging here . I want to get some nonpartisan, thoughtful analysis of legislative issues posted on the front page here. If you’re interested in blogging here, drop me a note by emailing me at the address ...

Want to blog here?

Oct 28, 2007 · News About GovTrack

He he.

Oct 23, 2007 · News About GovTrack

Totally not useful to anyone, but I thought I’d share— I’m confirmed attendee #9 to a conference in December, and #10 is a hero of mine, to the extent I have any heroes. Can’t wait.

Downloadable/Printable District Maps

Oct 22, 2007 · News About GovTrack

Just added a new feature: high-resolution district maps that can be downloaded (and printed), with no unreasonable copyright restrictions. To get the maps, find the district map, , and look below the map for download options. The downloadable maps use street data from which is (incredibly) ...

Communicating with Congress

Oct 2, 2007 · News About GovTrack

As a politically active citizen, you may have noticed that GovTrack seems to be missing the usual one-click Contact Your Congressperson tool, instead referring you from people pages here to the home pages of official websites at the House and Senate. Yesterday, I (Josh) attended a conference in D.C. on ...

Video link

Aug 23, 2007 · News About GovTrack

Someone makes a video praising GovTrack.

Site status

Aug 23, 2007 · News About GovTrack

GovTrack has moved over to its new hardware so things should be working normally again. More or less.

Sunlight review of GovTrack

Aug 9, 2007 · News About GovTrack

Sunlight has posted . If you’re not sure how to start using this site, the review highlights one path.

Site outages and status

Aug 8, 2007 · News About GovTrack

If you’ve used GovTrack at all lately, you’ve probably noticed the chronic outages that have grown considerably worse over the last few months as traffic has increased (with some 8,000 people visiting daily now). There have been a few independent problems. One was a software bug (it wasn’t my fault!) ...

Widgets for your website (and two APIs)

Jul 28, 2007 · News About GovTrack

GovTrack has had a few widgets that you can embed on your website to show tracked events or the status of bills, and, for developers, now it’s possible to use the Google Maps congressional district overlays on your own Google Maps mash-ups. There’s also a REST API for searching legislation. ...

Milestone note

Jul 21, 2007 · News About GovTrack

This month, the 30,000th user created an account on this site!

A new ally for transparency: Larry Lessig

Jun 19, 2007 · News About GovTrack

Lawrence Lessig, someone I admire greatly, and someone I would really love to meet one day, is a lawyer and professor that over the last ten years has advocated and fought for sane copyright laws in the public’s interest, in the face of the media industry’s constant push for extensions ...

MAPLight.org

May 27, 2007 · News About GovTrack

Now, I don’t by any means mean to keep touting my own horn or anything, but as a matter of keeping readers up to date about news related to GovTrack, it happens that I keep having to point out where a bit of credit is due to GovTrack. David Pogue ...

OpenMass

May 2, 2007 · News About GovTrack

From Ellen Miller’s blog at Sunlight, a note about OpenMass: “We are delighted to point you to — a new website that takes our OpenCongress.org open source framework and applies it to Massachusetts legislation, legislators and news about issues in the state. As ...

Site Updates: New Presidential Page and More

Apr 29, 2007 · News About GovTrack

A few site updates to mention: First, I’ve created a new page for those candidates that have served in Congress, which is actually most. You can see how they line up in political leanings as I’ve sorted them based on their position in GovTrack’s . The page has been updated ...

What’s happening with transparency?

Mar 31, 2007 · News About GovTrack

Not much. The Democrats have had three months and so far we’ve seen no significant progress in transparency. Paul Blumenthal over at Sunlight . In other news, the is in the final steps of assembling our report for Speaker Pelosi. I’ve written up two sections, one recommending that the legislative ...

OpenCongress.org

Feb 27, 2007 · News About GovTrack

Yesterday launched It is basically a sister site to GovTrack, but with different parents (i.e. we’re not affiliated). Based on the that GovTrack makes available for others to reuse, OpenCongress will be focusing on collaborative analysis of legislation. I think there’s room enough in the world for two ...

New Search Feature

Feb 22, 2007 · News About GovTrack

If you use the special , you can now search previous Congresses: just add a slash and the Congress number, like H.R. 1828/108 or accountability/107 .

Announcing “The Open House Project”

Feb 8, 2007 · News About GovTrack

It’s rare when Congress asks _the people_ for help being transparent, and so I’m particularly pleased to announce the formation of , a Sunlight Foundation-sponsored project with the encouragement of Speaker Pelosi that will be making specific proposals about how The House can better use the Internet in ...

New Features!

Jan 6, 2007 · News About GovTrack

Check out these new features on GovTrack: * The full text of bills is and highlights the changes made to the text during its legislative history, such as due to amendments and substitutions. * The now show a recent voting history, an ideology meter, and pages for senators show their ...

A New Congress Begins

Jan 1, 2007 · News About GovTrack

The 110th Congress starts on January 4, and the Democrats have promised a New Year’s resolution for us: Congress will be held to a higher standard of ethics and accountability. Let’s see if they keep to their promise and enact meaningful legislation for government transparency. Remember that with ...

Returning with new Features

Sep 5, 2006 · News About GovTrack

As Congress returns to work, GovTrack adds a new feature: are now listed for all Members of Congress.

Crazy Maps? No, Cartograms!

Jul 31, 2006 · News About GovTrack

You may notice the vote maps on this site look all crazy now. They’re “cartograms,” distorted mathematically so that every state (for Senate votes) or congressional district (for House votes) gets an equal amount of space in the image. (In House vote maps, look how big California got, or see ...

Not a Winner

Sep 13, 2005 · News About GovTrack

Last month GovTrack was nominated as the entry for the United States in the e-Government category of the , which is somehow part of the UN World Summit on Information Society. GovTrack wasn’t one of the 40 world-wide winners, but I was amused by the choice of winners in the ...

Personal Democracy Forum

May 17, 2005 · News About GovTrack

So, yesterday I attended the Personal Democracy Forum in NYC. Overall I give it an “eh,” but I think it accomplished pretty well what it set out to do. It’s just that I was hoping for something a little bit different. I arrived late (thanks to Amtrak delays) and left ...

Amendments to legislation

May 2, 2005 · News About GovTrack

Some information about amendments to bills are now being tracked by GovTrack (ex: ). Any suggestions about that .

Political Site of the Day

Apr 27, 2005 · News About GovTrack

Who am I to argue with the ?

Personal Democracy Forum

Apr 13, 2005 · News About GovTrack

In case you’re wondering where the money from the ads at the top of the page goes, I’m using it to travel to advocate using technology to open up access to information about the government. Next month I’m going to attend the . I don’t know much about ...

Statements of Administration Policy Reports Now Available

Mar 29, 2005 · News About GovTrack

Thanks to a suggestion from Peggy Garvin, OMB Statement of Administration Policy PDFs are also now available on GovTrack.

Congressional Budget Reports Now Available

Mar 25, 2005 · News About GovTrack

I stumbled on Congressional Budget Office reports this morning, and now they’re available on GovTrack. Whenever a new CBO report is available for a bill you are monitoring, a new “Report Event” will show up in your tracked events (on the site, in the RSS feeds, and by email).

Review in LLRX

Mar 20, 2005 · News About GovTrack

Peggy Garvin wrote for last week.

My Trip to D.C.

Mar 9, 2005 · News About GovTrack

Last night I got back from a two-day trip to D.C. The point of the trip was to make a presentation about GovTrack and also to start some collaboration with others on expanding the political information that is freely and openly available online. Monday afternoon I presented GovTrack and some ...

Site Glitches

Mar 8, 2005 · News About GovTrack

Sorry about the site having some issues this week. I’ll fix it as soon as I get back from my trip to D.C (which, by the way, is going very well, except for Expedia botching my hotel reservation).

Daily Princetonian Article

Mar 3, 2005 · News About GovTrack

Thanks to my friend David Robinson, the The Daily Princetonian . I used to be an editor for the ‘Prince’, and I’m happy to know that articles still aren’t finished by deadline.

All Your Info in One Place — BusinessWeek Online

Feb 8, 2005 · News About GovTrack

BusinessWeek Online’s Olga Kharif uses GovTrack to show the potential of web services in posted today.

Notable Resources

Feb 4, 2005 · News About GovTrack

Here are some notable things you can find on GovTrack: the recent , and the nomination votes for and .

A New Milestone

Jan 28, 2005 · News About GovTrack

There was a short in yesterday’s Circuits section about GovTrack, and as a result the number of registered users on the site has topped 1,000! The article reached a broad audience, and I’ve gotten a few emails from people running other websites who share the common goal of seeing technology ...

Sharing, Collaborating, and Benefiting

Jan 22, 2005 · News About GovTrack

Now that GovTrack is pretty much functionally complete, I’m shifting my focus to how websites with similar goals as GovTrack can share data, collaborate, and generally benefit from each other. This is partly what we’ve been talking about on the GovTrack mail list regarding making the California-level data compatible in ...