Apps for America

Filed in National by on April 27, 2009

I heard this report on NPR on Friday — which talked about the winners of the Sunlight Foundation’s Apps for America contest. The goal of this contest was to have developers compete for prizes to create applications that let Internet users have greater visibility into the Federal Congressional process. The results are pretty impressive:

  1. Filibusted.us — This website aggregates data from GovTrack and Sunlight Labs to provide a daily list of obstructionist votes as well as contact information for the Senator(s) filabustering.
  2. Legistalker — Aggregates news items (online), You Tube appearances, Twitter activity of Congresspeople.  This looks like you can create a Watch List where you can focus on the law makers that interest you.
  3. Know Thy Congressman — A bookmarklet that would allow you to see a collection of available data on a congressperson as you are reading on the web.
  4. e-papertrail — Lets you watch over what your congresspeople are saying on the floor,  watch votes and compare congresspeople.

There’s more at the link — each that I’ve looked at are pretty great efforts to help people get and stay informed.  More than a few of these would be awesome resources to add to a blog page (but most aren’t formulated for that).  But it is really good to see this kind of open source effort to get more government information to our desks directly.  Now if only some of these would exist for local governments…

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"You don't make progress by standing on the sidelines, whimpering and complaining. You make progress by implementing ideas." -Shirley Chisholm

Comments (4)

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  1. Mark says:
    April 27, 2009 at 4:14 pm

    Glad you stumbled across the “Apps for America” contest. Not sure that many people know that Delaware was represented in this competition.

    (My own entry into the contest — hearmesaythis.org — received an honorable mention.)

    This service will be coming out of private beta in the next few weeks and will be opened up to the general public. Just ironing out the last few tweaks.

    If you’ve got a cell phone, a Twitter account and something to say to the people that represent you in Congress, I think you’ll find it very interesting.

    Mark
    (formerly Delawonk)

  2. cassandra_m says:
    April 27, 2009 at 4:23 pm

    Here is the link to HereMeSayThis.

    Very cool, Mark! Congratulations on making the list — these are all great apps. Let us know when it is open to the public — I’m sure our twitter users will want to try this out.

  3. pandora says:
    April 27, 2009 at 5:09 pm

    That’s amazingly great, Mark! Congratulations!

  4. Unstable Isotope says:
    April 27, 2009 at 5:30 pm

    All those applications sound very interesting.

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