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:
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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…