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GovTrack.us with SocialActions widget
Challenges Entered:
GovTrack.us is an (already existing) website that tracks what's happening in the United States Congress. Launched in 2004, it was the first site to apply open source, open data, and Web 2.0 to the U.S. legislative process and is a leader in the new "civic hacking" movement. The site helps users research Congress and follow the status of legislation through feeds, maps, and other innovations, and the site supports other civic projects by openly sharing its legislation database with other websites such as OpenCongress.org and MAPLight.org.
For this project submission, we have added a Social Actions box to pages for bills in Congress. Social Actions provides an API into their index of social causes, such as petitions, around the web. We believe that Social Actions will help visitors to GovTrack find related causes such as to support or oppose a bill. Though GovTrack is nonpartisan and doss not generally involve itself in issue advocacy, we suspect that GovTrack's users will find a Social Actions widget very useful.
The widget searches for related actions by using a bill's number.
Not all bills are related to any issues, so you may not find the widget just browsing GovTrack. Here are some bills that people have created actions around:
Food Safety Modernization Act of 2009:http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bill.xpd?bill=h111-875
Blair Holt's Firearm Licensing and Record of Sale Act of 2009: http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bill.xpd?bill=h111-45
Fair Tax Act of 2009: http://www.govtrack.us/congress/bill.xpd?bill=h111-25
The widget is in a blue box toward the middle/bottom of the page.
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Go Civic Engagement
Joshua,
You are among the first (if not the first) innovator to mashup up legislation with ways to take action from across the web - Congrats!
I quite like how you've integrated ways to take action to Govtrack.us! The "action box" complements the "Question & Answer" section quite well - adding to the ways to engage around legislation.
Thank you for sharing how the widget searches for related actions (by using a bill's number) - That's very cool! Have you found enough matching actions to consider adding pagination to the box?
I'm excited to learn of the stories of GovTrack users who get involved with the legislative process because they discovered ways to take action on your site!
Best,
Joe Solomon
Social Actions