About Open Congress

OpenCongress brings together official government information with news and blog coverage to give you the real story behind what's happening in Congress.

For most people, finding out what's really happening in Congress is a daunting and time-consuming task. The legislative process is frequently arcane and closed-off from the public, resulting in frustration with Congress and apathy about politics.

Small groups of political insiders and lobbyists know what's really going on in Congress, but this important information rarely makes its way into the light. The official website of the library of Congress, Thomas, publishes the full text of bills, but we can do much more to inform ourselves and make our government accessible. Now, with OpenCongress, everyone can be an insider.

OpenCongress is a free, open-source, non-profit, and non-partisan web resource with a mission to help make Congress more transparent and to encourage civic engagement. OpenCongress is a joint project of the Sunlight Foundation and the Participatory Politics Foundation.

OpenCongress brings together, for the first time in one place, all the best data on what's really happening in Congress:

• Official Congressional information from Thomas, made available by GovTrack.us: bills, votes, committee reports, and more.
• News articles about bills and Members of Congress from Google News.
• Blog posts about bills and Members of Congress from Google Blog Search and Technorati.
• Campaign contribution information for every Member of Congress from the website of the non-profit, non-partisan Center for Responsive Politics, OpenSecrets.org.
• OpenCongress Blog: a blog written by the site editors of OpenCongress that highlights useful news and blog reporting from around the web. The blog also solicits tips, either anonymous or attributed, from political insiders, citizen journalists, and the public in order to build public knowledge about Congress.

OpenCongress taps into the valuable social wisdom that is available on the web, combined with official Congressional information and features to track what's hot, to give you a comprehensive snapshot of every bill and Member of Congress.

Each page on OpenCongress provides access to the full official details of a bill: the text of the bill itself, its status in Congress, its voting results. At the same time, each page allows you to see the "big picture" behind a bill: recent news analyses of it, what its buzz is on blogs, what industries gave campaign contributions to its sponsors. News coverage and blog commentary are vital to understanding the Congressional process and help to translate the highly technical language of bills into something more intelligible. Future versions of OpenCongress will introduce more new features in this regard, as well as more ways to collaboratively analyze legislation and engage with Congress.

OpenCongress allows anyone to easily track a bill, a Member of Congress, or an issue area, and to conveniently follow developments in any of those areas by subscribing to its RSS feed. We aim to close the information lag and bring people closer to the Congressional process. Every bill on OpenCongress is also organized by a common issue area, as assigned by the government agency the Congressional Research Service, so you can find bills of interest just by browsing an issue area that matters to you. Along the way, OpenCongress lets you know which bills are the hottest: the most viewed, the most written about in the news, the most buzzed-about on blogs.

OpenCongress can work as a tool for exposing corruption, putting a spotlight on wasteful spending, and holding politicians accountable for their records. Recent scandals in Congress prove that wasteful spending and pay-to-play corruption are still endemic to the closed-off Congressional process. In this way, Open Congress works to open up the doors and show how Congress actually works, as well as the real-world implications of bills. By getting at what bills are, what they propose to do, who is behind each bill, and where the money is coming from, we hope to inform and add power to everyone’s political ideas.

Watch a video overview of OpenCongress, the information we offer, and ways you can use the site. This screencast was graciously created by Ryanne Hodson and Jay Dedman of RyanIsHungry.com as a volunteer project.

OpenCongress: Separate the Signal from the Noise

In January of 1995, Congress launched Thomas, the online home of the Library of Congress, making available the full text of bills under consideration in Congress. Thomas is a positive starting place for Congressional transparency, and continues to add new features as any website of its kind would. But in its current state, put simply, Thomas is not a user-friendly web resource for a wide audience. The site's presentation of bill information can be difficult to understand, and bills are presented flatly, without any indicators of which ones (say, major appropriations bills) are more significant than others (say, resolutions naming post offices). With tens of thousands of bills and resolutions introduced each session of Congress, it's difficult to separate the signal from the noise and keep your eye on bills that are really important.

What's more, Thomas does little to make the arcane language of bills -- to say nothing of the bill-to-law process -- into something intelligible to a wider audience. Because the information of Congressional bills seems inaccessible, much writing on the web about politics is curiously divorced from the actual text of bills in Congress. There is a diverse and flourishing ecosystem of political blogs, and a huge number of engaged readers of political news, but for many reasons, the actual text of bills is not as frequently discussed on political blogs as it could be. Issue-based groups sometimes send "action alerts" to their members on specific bills, but such sporadic actions reflect the more general shortcoming: it's difficult for large numbers of people to stay engaged with the sometimes-glacial, sometimes-tumultuous Congressional process.

The inaccessibility of Congressional information contributes to the widespread perception that the Congressional process is the realm of a privileged few, or worse, is irrelevant to our everyday lives. Just the opposite is true: the text of bills that are often crafted in Congressional subcommittees and voted on via obscure parliamentary maneuvers can have significant real-world implications, both at the kitchen table and abroad. Now we have the web tools to open up the Congressional process to effective public scrutiny and collaborative analysis. While there are improvements planned in this regard, OpenCongress offers a step forward by harnessing the wide-ranging body of social wisdom about Congress that is available in online news articles and blog posts. By placing the voices of journalists and bloggers directly alongside official Congressional information, OpenCongress seeks to contextualize and demystify Congress as a whole.

Congress produces thousands of bills and resolutions and statements each session, but together, we can focus attention on the ones that make the most difference. Which bills are the hottest on Capitol Hill? Which bills have the most money riding on them? Which bills affect the issues you care about? Which bills are the most volatile, or the most closely contested? OpenCongress offers anyone the ability to subscribe to RSS feeds of the most-viewed bills, Members of Congress, as well as RSS feeds listing the bills most written-about in the news and on blogs, so that you can keep track on the weightiest bills in the Congressional fray. We encourage organizations, membership groups, bloggers, and others to syndicate this "most-viewed on OpenCongress" information on their websites and thereby increase the number of people following the truly important bills in Congress.

About the Information on Open Congress

OpenCongress uses data provided by GovTrack.us, which collects data from official government websites, such as Thomas, through daily automated processes. All legislative information on OpenCongress originates from official government sources, and there is no editing of its details. We're committed to working alongside GovTrack and other data partners to ensure that new Congressional data is displayed as quickly as possible. Thanks especially to Joshua Tauberer of GovTrack for his generosity and expertise in this public service.

OpenCongress uses Google News to obtain news articles about Congress, and Google Blog Search and Technorati to obtain blog posts about Congress. Thanks to both Google and Technorati for making this sort of open public resource possible. OpenCongress uses these automated services to search the internet widely for relevant search terms to display on OpenCongress pages for bills and Members of Congress. For example, if somewhere on the web someone refers to a bill names (such as "H.R. 1") or the name of a Member of Congress, that page is likely to soon be captured by the automated search function and included on the appropriate page on OpenCongress. While this process is neither immediate nor entirely comprehensive, it amounts to a significant step towards bringing together official Congressional information with the social wisdom and valuable context created by people in news and blog posts. We will be continually refining this process in order to make Open Congress as comprehensive as possible a public resource on every bill and Member of Congress.

For each Member of Congress, OpenCongress provides links to their profile on Congresspedia, the "citizen's encyclopedia on Congress" that anyone can edit. Congresspedia is a not-for-profit, collaborative project of the Center for Media and Democracy and the Sunlight Foundation and is overseen by an editor to help ensure fairness and accuracy. Congresspedia is part of SourceWatch, a wiki-based website documenting the people, organizations and issues shaping the public agenda. Each profile on Congresspedia provides detailed biographical information on Members of Congress, their backgrounds, and their place in the Congressional landscape.

OpenCongress uses campaign contribution information provided by the Center for Responsive Politics and their website Open Secrets. We are grateful for this service and appreciate their vital role in making the Congressional process more transparent. We will continue to work with the Center for Responsive Politics and other non-profits providing Congressional analysis in order to bring in more data about money in politics. Our goal is to make it possible for anyone to use OpenCongress to draw more detailed connections between lobbyists, campaign contributions, and specific legislation proposed by Members of Congress.

Features Coming Next in Open Congress

This first phase of OpenCongress has focused on bringing together government data, blog and press coverage, and non-profit analysis into a comprehensive snapshot of every congressional bill.

But to truly narrow the gap between what Congressional insiders know and what average citizens know, we need be able to add detail and richness that doesn't come from the public data sources. When people view a bill on OpenCongress, they should be able to see not just the bill details, but also the real story behind the bill. Towards this goal, we'll soon be adding more interactive features to OpenCongress to allow for greater user engagement with the Congressional process:

• User Logins: the ability for users to register a username and password with OpenCongress and create user profiles, making it possible for site visitors to contribute their time, writing, and social wisdom to OpenCongress in the ways outlined below.
• Bill Summary: spaces to summarize arcane legislation into plain language, demystifying the process so that everyone can understand how bills work and their implications.
• Collaborative Analysis: spaces and message boards to contribute collective analysis of important legislation. Together we can do more to identify conflicts of interest, wasteful spending, and potential corruption. Also, we can identify instances of praiseworthy legislation and acknowledge when a politician keeps a pledge.
• Bill Tagging: a good way to make the Congressional process more intelligible is to allow people to "tag" bills on OpenCongress, creating folksonomies and providing an easy-to-understand summary of a bill as it's commonly described in the national press. For example, if you're looking for a bill about the internet issue of "net neutrality," OpenCongress will make it possible to find bills that have been tagged by users as such, so that you don't need to know a specific bill name to find the information you're looking for. We'll work to make this tagging work with bookmarking services, such as del.icio.us, so that tagging bills becomes an easy and popular practice for web users.
• Action Calendars: tools to keep track of when important legislation is scheduled for a vote, and to identify the most productive windows of time to contact Congresspeople with your feedback. For example, OpenCongress will make available feeds for iCalendar and other popular calendar applications so that you can be conveniently reminded to contact Congress about issues and bills you care about.

To keep in touch with our site development schedule, you can sign up for our e-mail mailing list on the bottom-left of our home page, and subscribe to our blog's RSS feed.

To volunteer with OpenCongress, or to find out more ways to help, simply send us an e-mail () with a short note of introduction, and we'll write you back:

• If you're a web programmer, you can help us develop the site and incorporate more data sources.
• If you're a graphic designer, you can help us improve our look and usability.
• If you're a blogger or citizen journalist, you can suggest a relevant link for the OpenCongress blog, or send us a tip to publish. Plus, if your blog posts refer to an individual bill's title, or an individual Member of Congress, or if you link to OpenCongress, your website is likely to appear on the appropriate page on OpenCongress.
• If you're a researcher, you can help us improve the site's explanatory text of parliamentary terms.
• If you're a political professional, you can submit insider tips to the OpenCongress blog.
• If you're an educator, you can recommend OpenCongress to colleagues and students as a free and accessible resource for government and political science studies.
• If you're someone who supports the mission of Open Congress, you can help us spread the word with outreach to more people who should know about the site: issue-based membership groups, family, friends, social networks, and more.

If you're interested in OpenCongress' code (which is written in the open-source web framework Ruby on Rails), you can get under the hood on our programming page.

We're always interested in hearing from you -- about how you're using OpenCongress, suggestions for how it can be more useful for you, and new features you'd like to see. Send us an e-mail anytime: .

Click here for more tips and suggestions on how you can use Open Congress to help you keep track of what's really happening in Congress, the issues you care about, and all of our elected officials.

About the Participatory Politics Foundation and the Sunlight Foundation

The Participatory Politics Foundation builds software tools and websites that create new opportunities for continual engagement with government. Voting is important, but we have a chance to go further and create a political process that is meritocratic, creative, and participatory. Each day, our lives abound in political feelings and opinions -- not just on Election Day. We believe that the internet presents an unprecedented opportunity to amplify political voices and actions. OpenCongress is a first step towards these goals.

The Sunlight Foundation was founded in January 2006 with the goal of using the revolutionary power of the Internet and new information technology to enable citizens to learn more about what Congress and their elected representatives are doing, and thus help reduce corruption, ensure greater transparency and accountability by government, and foster public trust in the vital institutions of democracy. The Participatory Politics Foundation is thankful for all the trust, ideas, and support that the Sunlight Foundation has given to this project.

OpenCongress is proud to be part of the Sunlight Foundation community. Another partner in this effort is the Open House Project, a working group designed to make recommendations to Congress on ways to begin the process of opening up the House of Representatives and increasing government transparency.