Blog - Articles Tagged 'wiki'

The new Congress is here, which means it's time for us to start holding them accountable. Over on the OpenCongress Wiki, we've got profiles of each of the 100+ members of the freshman class of 2012, and we need your help to track all the promises and positions they took during the campaign. Take, for example, Rep. Larry Bucshon (R, IN-08), pictured at right... click through to the full article below for some biographical background and policy positions that puts him in helpful context.

Our first task for researching the Class of 2012 is simply finding out what they look like. Help out your fellow citizens by finding pictures of the freshman members on the Web and uploading them to OpenCongress Wiki here. It's easy and has the immediate gratification of seeing the photo all over our site!

Last night, there were 44 House primaries, 4 Senate primaries, and 7 gubernatorial primaries.  You can track them -- in fact, every race in the country, every 2010 midterm -- on our non-partisan, publicly-editable wiki project: RaceTracker.  Click through for links to each individual race and a helpful one-sentence summary of exactly where things stand after last night.

Bills in Congress are notoriously complicated. And while OpenCongress brings you closer to their substance by surrounding bills with helpful news analysis, blog commentary, and comments from the public, sometimes the crux of the issue remains, well, murky. That's where the OpenCongress Wiki comes in. The Wiki offers useful narrative explanations for some of the most newsworthy bills this session of Congress. A great example is H.R. 1 - last February's economic stimulus package. The wiki tab f...

We have four major features to announce on OpenCongress today, and we are very excited about each one of them. Here's an overview, with more info and examples in the full post:

1. OpenCongress Wiki - for every Senator, Representative and major piece of legislation in Congress, there is now a space for people to work together to build a comprehensive overview of all the most important information.

2. Videos from Metavid, the open video archive of the U.S. Congress, and the YouTube hubs for the House and Senate. Now, for every Senator, Representative, and major bill in Congress, OpenCongress shows you embedded video footage of relevant floor speeches, official announcements, and more.

3. Inline bill text commenting, now with the ability to compare different versions of a bill. Building off our feature to comment and link to a bill's official text, paragraph-by-paragraph, now text changes are displayed in different color type for at-a-glance comparison.

4. For the Read The Bill campaign from the Sunlight Foundation and others, a new page to track bills that have been rushed through the Congressional process.