“My OpenCongress” already offers ways to track and comment on any bill, issue, or Member of Congress, as well as social networking and more. These changes will create new ways for users to customize the stream of updates they view and share on their profiles. First, Open Calais makes it possible to access rich metadata about tracked items. For example, if a user is tracking a Senator, data from the Open Calais API can inform you by automatically displaying associated organizations, facts, and events – “This Senator was appointed the Chairman of this committee on this date, click here to view more connections”. Second, Daylife makes it possible to access professionally-moderated news coverage of tracked items. For the example of a tracked Senator, the Daylife API can suggest related stories, articles, images, and topics – “Daylife Editors selected four news articles about this Senator in the past month, click here to view them”. Instead of following every news mention of a bill or issue (higher-volume), users could choose to receive only featured content (lower-volume). Our open-source development team welcomes input on these two API's, especially from their programmers, and suggestions on other data sources to consider. (Obviously, there are lots of viable options out there.)

What information will people interact with to make this change?: Metavid is working on bringing in many different datasets to texture the online legislative archive. Metavid builds on semantic web technologies to enable high expressive data queries. We have began to import data from maplight, govtracker and the official c-span synced transcripts. For example it should soon be possible to run queries like: Show me clips of Californian representatives who received more than X dollars from companies in category pharmaceutical mentioning the word drugs. These queries automatically become rss feeds that can be syndicated and tracked in web portals like iGoogle or in video rss players like Miro. When combined with an expanding archive of legislative video, metavid should be a powerful data set for participants to interact with. Additionally it should support the government mash ups community with easy to query relations. So you can convert from govtrack people ids to maplight people ids (for example).