Knight Foundation
Home

Send to Friend

FromTo


Proposal from knightcontest.com

OpenCongress Local Portals

Primary Contact Name

David Moore

Describe your project

OpenCongress Local Portals: empowering state and local bloggers to track the issues they care about in Congress, and collaboratively lobby Members of Congress, using customized information from the open-source public resource website OpenCongress.org.
OpenCongress.org is a public resource website that combines official government data with news and blog coverage to give you the real story behind each bill. The problem we’re seeking to address is a lack of accessible information for local bloggers and membership groups about Congressional legislation and how it affects their issues. For example, it’s currently difficult for a local environmental group to keep track of bills in Congress that affect its concerns – the latest status of a given bill in the Congressional process, which groups support or oppose it, which industries have given campaign contributions to its co-sponsors, and how to coordinate their actions to collaboratively lobby Congress in timely and productive ways. OpenCongress.org launched in February 2007 and currently provides information about every bill, Member of Congress, over 4,000 issue areas, and more. The information we aggregate and create, however, could be of even greater accessibility and better targeted for local bloggers, membership groups, journalists, and individuals (both civically-inclined and not). Currently, while there are ways for local individuals to use OpenCongress to track information at the federal level, there is not an interface for them to log in directly to the information that affects them at the state or local level. In addition, OpenCongress does not currently have features such as “action alerts” that allow groups to create their own calendars for collectively lobbying Congress at crucial stages in the legislative process. The Participatory Politics Foundation proposes to accomplish this by partnering with the Knight Foundation to build on OpenCongress portals for every state and Congressional district, along with the ability for users to create highly local portals for their own cities or neighborhoods. Each portal would offer innovative features that would allow users of OpenCongress at the state and local level to get involved by subscribing to calendars and action alerts for collective lobbying and collaborative analysis of bills.

Primary Contact Email

davidrussellmoore@gmail.com

Organization or Business Name

Participatory Politics Foundation

Who would want to use it and why?

The first target audience is the current user community of OpenCongress, who would use these new features to connect more closely with their Members of Congress and other users in their district. Local membership groups would want to use these portals to facilitate issue-based collective lobbying. Local citizen journalists, activists, and political bloggers would want to be able to track Congress and have direct access to locally relevant information for their communities. Anyone could join groups within these portals for updates on her state, district, and even neighborhood. No other web resource offers comparable and customizable action alerts for collective lobbying, so this represents a significant step forward for anyone interested in connecting with Congress. These will bring OpenCongress down to the local level.

Why are you the best person or organization to develop this project?

First, OpenCongress is already a well-recognized public resource in making Congressional information more accessible to a wide audience. Already the site has received over 520,000 unique pageviews since launch on February 26, 2007, and over 10 million hits counting RSS readers. Second, the Participatory Politics Foundation is a small and agile non-profit that operates with virtually no overhead - resources made available will go directly into programming, design, and outreach for these user-friendly and innovative new portals. Our not-for-profit mission means that we are free to focus on core development that is best for empowering users, educating the public, building open-source tools using open standards of technology, and working with existing popular services such as Facebook, Digg, and others. Third, the Participatory Politics Foundation is the sister organization of the Participatory Culture Foundation, a separate non-profit organization that received a previous grant from the Knight Foundation in 2006 to build the online public resource MakeInternetTV (http://makeinternettv.org/), a guide with "step-by-step instructions for shooting, editing, and publishing online videos that can be watched and subscribed to by millions of people" -- improving citizen media through education. For this new project, the overall yearlong proposed budget of $240,000 will encompass all of the support needed to build these state and local portals. The sum of $20,000 per month for 12 months will make it possible for the Participatory Politics Foundation to hire two full-time web programmers, one part-time programmer, a design consultant, and one full-time outreach coordinator for these new features. Finally, along with these new portals, OpenCongress will continue its work in conducting wide-ranging outreach to individuals and groups who can make use of this information and features: local citizen and professional journalists, local bloggers, issue-based groups, activists, and anyone interested in easier ways of connecting with Congress.

U.S. State

MA

Country

United States

What potentially bigger thing might happen if everything went perfectly and the stars all aligned?

The ultimate goal of state and local OpenCongress portals is to foster a more participatory politics, one where individuals feel informed and connected to their Members of Congress, and feel that their opinions matter. Open web tools make this possible: such portals will empower anyone, at a highly local level, to easily track, comment upon, and act upon what’s happening in Congress. The proposed state and local portals will be of use for both “grasstops” activists (issue-based membership groups who already use e-mail, for example) and “grassroots” activists (who may only have a few minutes a day to catch up with the latest news from Congress, but wish to make their voices heard). If the stars align and these local portals catch on in popularity, the result will be an observable increase in civic engagement, in the form of citizens contacting their Members of Congress about the issues that are important to them and participating in the substance of the legislative process. For elected officials, these portals will immediately serve as a way of connecting with their constituents’ concerns. In a larger sense, these portals will remind Members that anyone using OpenCongress can track their latest votes and campaign contributions, and can easily share their findings with their online communities, thereby encouraging government transparency and discouraging corruption. Journalists, bloggers, activists and membership groups will all have an unparalleled tool for following the daily news from Congress and sharing the most useful information. A local environmental activist, for example, may visit her local portal on OpenCongress and read an interesting fact about her Representative in a blog post, then share the item with her friends, encouraging them to contact their Representative directly to voice an opinion. The vision is that by connecting people more closely to what’s really happening in Congress, we can foster peer-to-peer civic engagement, fight corruption in government, and combat political apathy about our democracy.

How will you be able to measure whether or not your project has really made a difference?

The nature of open web-based projects such as these portals ensures that we will be able to precisely measure the difference that this project has made. First, as we do on a continual basis already, we will be able to track page views of every new state and local portal page using Google Analytics, following trends and preparing reports of site usage. Second, when new users register a free account with OpenCongress they will indicate their Congressional District of residence, meaning that we will be able to see geographically where the state and local portals are growing fastest. For any given local portal, then, we can see both how many views it has received overall and how many users have indicated they reside there. Third, as we do on a continual basis already, we will use existing services like Technorati and Google Alerts to track how many outside websites are linking to the new portals, what they’re saying about them, and how they are using our open tools. Fourth, we will observe patterns of site participation within the new state and local portals themselves, following what content and features are the most popular, and encourage users to send us feedback with their suggestions. Fifth, we will track the number of users who are subscribed to various action alerts from each state and local portal – how many users are connected to each portal through e-mail alerts, RSS feeds, iCal alerts, Outlook alerts, and other ways. Overall page views and site participation for OpenCongress will be other ways of measuring that individuals are viewing and connecting with the new state and local portals. In summary, the foundation for detailed measurements of these new state and local portals is already in-place, and we will be in a position to make subsequent decisions based on what we observe on a daily basis.

Web site

http://participatorypolitics.org

Requested amount from Knight News Challenge

$240000

What unmet need does your proposal answer?

The overall problem we’re seeking to address is a lack of accessible information for local bloggers and membership groups about Congressional legislation and how it affects their issues. For example, it’s currently difficult for a local environmental group to keep track of bills in Congress that affect its concerns – the latest status of a given bill in the Congressional process, which groups support or oppose it, which industries have given campaign contributions to its co-sponsors, and how to coordinate their actions to collaboratively lobby Congress in timely and productive ways. There is no existing free and open-source website for the public that provides such services, though D.C. lobbyists and large membership groups currently pay for expensive private services that track the details of legislation in the pipeline. OpenCongress offers a first step for local individuals to track information at the federal level, there is not currently a way for them to log in directly to the information that affects them at the state or local level. In addition, there is a lack of free web services that allow individuals and groups to coordinate their citizen lobbying efforts on behalf of their Congressional district– that is, to create their own calendars for collectively contacting Congress and sending out “action alerts” at crucial stages in the legislative process. Individual membership groups may stage sporadic “call-ins”, and there exist some commercial services in this area, but there exists no site for this that is free, open-access, not-for-profit, and user-friendly. For small grassroots groups, many of which simply do not have robust presences online, these state and local portals would provide both the information and the action alerts for their membership to contact Congress and make their voice heard in substantive ways. Finally, there are no current resources that allow users to create portals for their own city, neighborhood, or block, connecting information about Congress to the issues affecting their very street.

Total cost of project, including all sources of funding

$240000

What specific, unique opportunity do you see that will make this project more successful than others trying to fill that general

The opportunity present in state and local portals on OpenCongress is first and foremost that our website is free, open-source, non-partisan, and not-for-profit. These principles underlie our work and ensure that we’re focused on usability for a wide community of web users. The Participatory Politics Foundation’s open mission further means that, unlike proprietary commercial services for D.C. insiders, individuals and organizations across the nation will be inclined to support and use these portals widely with their membership. Second, OpenCongress has an existing reputation as a unique online resource for Congressional information and positive buzz with prominent bloggers. Our site launch in February 2007 was covered by major political, technology, and cultural websites, as well as traditional media such as NPR and thousands of local bloggers. Third, OpenCongress already has a dedicated user base (who come to us through site visits, e-mail alerts, RSS feeds, outside links, and online searches) that will provide the first wave of users of these new portals. We will be able to hit the ground running and thereby reach out to more new users through peer-to-peer outreach and social sharing features built-in to the portals themselves. Finally, no other website offers the specific and unique package of features described here: ways to learn about your Members of Congress, ways to track bills and issues, ways to share your findings with your friends and family, ways to join others in your state and Congressional district who care about the issues you do, and ways to sign up for action alerts that remind you to contact Congress and make your voice heard on a huge variety of issues.

Expected amount of time to complete project (in whole years):

1years

How will people learn about what you are doing?

People will initially learn about new OpenCongress state and local portals through a wide-ranging online outreach campaign, in coordination with the Knight Foundation, that utilizes both peer-to-peer social sharing and mentions from prominent online writers. Subsequently, people will continue to learn about these state and local portals through their issue-based membership groups, links from political bloggers, and their social networks - but to return to the initial launch. Outreach campaigns are one of the core strengths of the Participatory Politics Foundation: our reputation for building user-friendly, open-source tools helps us to “spread the word” on some of the most-read sites on the web. The initial site launch in February 2007 was mentioned very positively in political blogs such as TalkingPointsMemo and Instapundit, technology blogs such as Mashable and SmartMobs, cultural blogs such as BoingBoing, social bookmarking services such as Digg, traditional media such as NPR’s “On the Media”, and many thousands of local bloggers. In addition, we are committed to working closely with the Knight Foundation program officers and your larger community in outreach surrounding these portals, as many of the citizen journalists and media activists in the Knight Foundation orbit are key users of such local portals. A full-time outreach coordinator has been budgeted for in this proposal, someone who will both acknowledge and further engage existing users of the portals and spread the word to targeted new users over e-mail and in-person when possible. On an ongoing basis, the portals are built and equipped with several ways of gathering new users on their own accord. Existing users will be able to invite their social networks to join local portals using peer-to-peer marketing: over e-mail, using popular sharing services, by republishing information from their portal on their own websites, and more. Groups will encourage their members to join to track their issues, receive action alerts on important bills and encourage others to get involved.

Do you have any other funding or investment? We’re interested in knowing who else is interested in your project.

The sole source of funding for OpenCongress has been the Sunlight Foundation, founded in 2006 with the goal of using technology to enable citizens to learn more about what their elected representatives are doing. OpenCongress is a joint project of the Sunlight Foundation and the Participatory Politics Foundation. As of this writing, we have not submitted any other applications for OpenCongress development to any foundations or individuals, other than this proposal to the Knight Foundation NewsChallenge. We are very interested in partnering with the Knight Foundation and its community to build these state and local portals on OpenCongress. We believe this partnership would be greatly advantageous: state and local portals on OpenCongress are directly suited to those people who seek to deliver information using digital media and connect with others in their geographic area. Citizen journalists and bloggers, as well as professional journalists and educators and more, would find that OpenCongress state and local portals would deliver them unique information and engaging ways of expanding the impact of their work.

Are you working with anyone else to complete this project? If so, please give names and what they would do?

The Participatory Politics Foundation would work in coordination with the Knight Foundation and existing contacts in the open-source community to complete the project, but the Participatory Politics Foundation would complete all core web development and design. In other words, we have the experience and capacity to build the state and local portals on OpenCongress, as well as to conduct a wide-ranging online outreach campaign surrounding them, but we welcome feedback along the way, and look forward to engaging with other online communities in spreading the word. Our existing relationship with the Sunlight Foundation is valuable here – we will seek to work with their community in the initial launch campaign. In addition, the Participatory Politics Foundation has been a participant in conferences held by the Harvard University Berkman Center and the Sunlight Foundation’s “Open Data Open Government” group – these are additional contacts that we value in helping to spread the word. But overall, the core development of state and local portals on OpenCongress will be completed by the Participatory Politics Foundation, in coordination with the Knight Foundation.

Who else is working in this area? How does your work fit into the larger context of work in this area?

In the area of state and local portals for Congressional information, there is no other website that approaches the package of features that OpenCongress proposes to provide, though there are several sites similarly active in promoting government transparency. Many of these are projects of the Sunlight Foundation. Congresspedia is an online wiki-based citizens’ encyclopedia on Congress hosted on the Center for Media & Democracy’s SourceWatch wiki. While we wholly support their mission and link extensively to their pages from our site, Congresspedia pages are fundamentally a wiki – a useful resource, but lacking the social, “friending” features that we’re proposing for OpenCongress local portals. On an OpenCongress portal for any Congressional District, users will be able to track a Member of Congress’ latest votes, follow news and blog coverage, bookmark and share info, and more. In addition, OpenCongress offers comprehensive links to every single bill in Congress and over 4,000 issue areas, which Congresspedia does not. Coming before the end of 2007, users of OpenCongress will have access to a host of entirely unique new features: the ability to log in to the site and comment on any bill, vote their support or opposition for any bill, build “My OpenCongress” pages of bills and issues they’re tracking, become “friends” with other users and organizations on OpenCongress, and more. The collaborative-lobbying calendars and “action alerts” proposed as part of these state and local portals would be a crucial and unique feature that would increase civic engagement in innovative ways. Other sites active in this area include the following: GovTrack.us, which generously provides Congressional data for OpenCongress, but which is not equipped with the above feature set; Congress.org, a free service of two commercial companies that lacks usability and most of the above feature set; and other individual projects in the Sunlight Foundation community, none of which offer users direct access to how your local neighborhood is affected by Congress.

What do you guarantee will happen if you complete the activities in this proposal?

We guarantee the following results upon completion of state and local portals for OpenCongress. First, the portals will receive an initial burst of links and mentions in prominent news and blog outlets. Second, the portals will experience an early spike of site traffic that will greatly expand knowledge of the project. Third, a significant number of new users will register accounts with OpenCongress in order to access the state and local portals and the new features therein. Fourth, these new users will increase overall site participation, as they comment on bills, subscribe to RSS feeds, become “friends” with other users in their districts, subscribe to “action alerts” from their issue-based membership groups, and invite others to get involved. Fifth, there will be a marked increase in links from outside sites to the new portals as local bloggers and activists make use of the targeted information and action alerts there. Sixth, issue-based membership groups will use OpenCongress alerts to coordinate call-in actions to Congress. Seventh, users will take advantage of the ability to create local portals for their city, neighborhood, or street, creating hyper-local ways of connecting Congressional legislation to the issues they care about. Overall, then, we guarantee a significantly expanded and more engaged user base for this open public resource. State and local portals on OpenCongress represent two innovative, exciting steps forward for bringing the business of Congress down to your street level, and building a more participatory politics.

Subscribe for Updates