We’ve made widgets to help you track particular bills, bills grouped by issue area, OpenCongress meta-data, and now — thanks to BritCrit’s clever solution — there’s a widget to help you track your Congresscritter. The OpenCongress team is actually busy developing our own widget for tracking senators and representatives, but in the meantime this widget, powered by Widgetbox.com, does the trick quite nicely. BritCrit’s made widgets for the senators from Texas, Massachusetts, and Michigan that you can download, and you can easily make your own for any member of Congress. Here’s one I made in about three minutes by following BritCrit’s simple instructions:

You can see all of Richard Neal’s (D-MA) recent votes with links back to the OpenCongress pages for the bills in question. From there, as always, you’ve got easy access to blog and news coverage from all over the internet to help you put the meaning of your congressperson’s votes in context. Neal hasn’t sponsored any bills super-recently, but if he had, they would show up in the widget as well.

Our own widget should be ready in about a month and it will have a few additional features such as links to blog and news coverage, most-recently sponsored bills, voting trend analysis, and committee membership.