Techfun

As Congress returns tomorrow to start a new session, OpenCongress is excited to announce a major update that will put all the bills and votes at your fingertips. It’s never been easier to track what’s happening with your government.

Now on OpenCongress, you can build a personal profile of bills and people you’re tracking, network with other users, comment and vote on bills, and much more.

To get started, create a "My OpenCongress" account — it’s free and takes less than a minute ::

http://www.opencongress.org/register

Here’s more info about these new features, launching today:

"My OpenCongress" — You’re Your Own Best Watchdog
 
"My OpenCongress" provides a personalized view of all the information you want about the laws being made in Washington. User profiles can track any bill, senator, representative, or issue area on the site simply by clicking "track this" at the top of any page. On your profile, you’ll have assembled a continually-updating view of everything you’re watching in Congress, along with personal RSS feeds to follow their latest actions.
 
Network — Make Friends Over Congress
 
 My OpenCongress is the first-ever social network designed for people who care about Congress. Find other users in your state or district, or anywhere else throughout the site, and invite them to become friends (or invite new users to join you). You’ll be able to view your friends’ recent actions on the site, creating a peer-to-peer way of sharing the most useful information about Congress — perfect for bloggers and issue-based groups. And if you want to organize a call-in day to Congress, you can easily get in touch with other constituents and mobilize your friends network.

Discuss — Comment on Congress
 
 Now there are comment boards on OpenCongress where people can discuss details, post links, give their opinions, and share the latest buzz. The boards are designed to filter up the comments rated "most helpful" by the community, using a simple slider bar located next to each comment. Each user builds up a site-wide rating for all of her comments, creating incentives for people with substantive insights or insider information to post more frequently.

 Evaluate — Rate News and Blog Coverage
 
 We’re making our flagship feature even more useful. Now,  OpenCongress users can rate the helpfulness of any news article or blog post on the site (via trusty slider bars next to each link).  Together, we can uncover and share the very best coverage about bills and Members of Congress available on the web, and then publish this valuable user-generated data back out to the world.
 
Vote — on Bills, Rate Senators and Reps
 
A fundamental goal of OpenCongress is to make it possible for people to give their opinions on bills, and the people making them, with access to all the official information and real-world context already available on the site. Now, OpenCongress users can vote "aye" or "nay" for every bill in Congress, give a personal approval rating to Senators and Representatives, and see the totals for each bill and Member. Coming soon, this data will be aggregated in unique, sortable
forums of all user votes sitewide.
 
For more info about these new features, please see the announcement today on our blog ::
 
http://www.opencongress.org/articles/view/386-Announcing-My-OpenCongress-Network-Comment-and-Vote-on-Congress

 OpenCongress is a joint project of the Sunlight Foundation and the Participatory Politics Foundation. Our work is free, open-source,
not-for-profit, and non-partisan. 

We look forward to hearing your feedback and hope that you’ll help build public knowledge by using "My OpenCongress". Thanks!

-The OpenCongress Team

http://www.opencongress.org/