GovTrack’s Summer/Fall Updates by Josh Tauberer.
From the post:
Here’s what’s been improved on GovTrack in the summer and fall of this year.
developers
- 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 Members of Congress voted.
- Our bill action/status flow charts on bill pages now include activity on certain related bills, which are often crucially important to the main bill.
- The bill cosponsors list now indicates when a cosponsor of a bill is no longer serving (i.e. because of retirement or death).
- We switched to gender neutral language when referring to Members of Congress. Instead of “congressman/woman”, we now use “representative.”
- Our historical votes database (1979-1989) from voteview.com was refreshed to correct long-standing data errors.
- We dropped support for Internet Explorer 6 in order to address with POODLE SSL security vulnerability that plagued most of the web.
- We dropped support for Internet Explorer 7 in order to allow us to make use of more modern technologies, which has always been the point of GovTrack.
The comment I posted was:
Great work! But I read the other day about legislation being “snuck” by the House (Senate changes), US Congress OKs ‘unprecedented’ codification of warrantless surveillance.
Do you have plans for a diff utility that warns members of either house of changes to pending legislation?
In case you aren’t familiar with GovTrack.us.
From the about page:
GovTrack.us, a project of Civic Impulse, LLC now in its 10th year, is one of the worldʼs most visited government transparency websites. The site helps ordinary citizens find and track bills in the U.S. Congress and understand their representatives’ legislative record.
In 2013, GovTrack.us was used by 8 million individuals. We sent out 3 million legislative update email alerts. Our embeddable widgets were deployed on more than 80 official websites of Members of Congress.
We bring together the status of U.S. federal legislation, voting records, congressional district maps, and more (see the table at the right).
and make it easier to understand. Use GovTrack to track bills for updates or get alerts about votes with email updates and RSS feeds. We also have unique statistical analyses to put the information in context. Read the «Analysis Methodology».GovTrack openly shares the data it brings together so that other websites can build other tools to help citizens engage with government. See the «Developer Documentation» for more.