Cross posted from my own blog.  I promise that this won’t be the rule, but I already wrote this yesterday while waiting for the BH confirmation e-mail.

I’ve been dying to blog about this site since I saw the beta call back in November.  Opencongress.org aims to add much-needed transparency and usable search tools to open the often closed, and intentionally obscure workings of the United States Congress.

It is the first project of the Participatory Politics Foundation, founded by the same people who have launched the Participatory Culture Foundation and it’s awesome Democracy Internet TV player.  Co-creator David Moore says:

One of the problems we were aiming to address is that there is a lack of comprehensive, usable web resources for people and groups writing about bills and issues in Congress. The Library of Congress website, Thomas, doesn’t do nearly enough to make Congressional information accessible — meaning that political bloggers didn’t have anywhere helpful to link when discussing Congress, that there wasn’t a way for their readers to get the “big picture” behind an issue. The lack of public knowledge about what’s really happening in Congress breeds apathy about political change in general.

OpenCongress helps close the information gap between political insiders and the public by bringing together official government information from Thomas (by way of GovTrack.us), news articles from Google News, blog posts from Technorati, campaign contribution data from OpenSecrets.org, and more — to give you the real story behind what’s happening in Congress.

I’ve been on the beta user list and have been noodling around with it since November (December?), and I can tell you it is easy to use to find out what bills are going where.  One can quite readily drill down to the excruciating details of bill language; the truly important stuff heretofore knowable and accessible in real-time only by staffers and industry lobbyists who help craft the actual bills.

One of the cooler features are the RSS feeds for the main site blog and for the interest areas that allow headlines to be streamed out to your web browser for quick access to breaking news and events.

This is a tool that has the potential to realize a lot of the promise that technology trend wonks like me keep spouting about networks and participatory culture.  I suggest everyone at least give it a look and bookmark it for future reference.