A new web service called “LegiStalker” (www.legistalker.org) launched this week. It’s a resource to allow citizens to stay informed of their legislators’ activities on social web sites and in the news – all public info, honest(!)
The web site was created by Forum One Communications as an entry for Sunlight Lab’s Apps for America Competition, an annual contest in which prizes go to developers who make Congress more accountable, interactive and transparent.
The site, which was built by Forum One in just a few weeks, uses data from Sunlight Foundation grantees and partners as well as other publicly available sources including Twitter, YouTube and Google News.
Cool. I think bloggers and the media will love it, I think members of Congress will hate it. Good work.
Cool Idea.
I hope the only congress that hates it are the ones making shady deals or pushing their agenda.
I know there will be flack because with a large group there are people on both sides of the coin – for and against. One can please some of the people most of the time, or some of the people most of the time but never all of the people all of the time.
Now if they would just write the bill in laymans english 😉
Pretty good. Given that it’s picking up on items often generated by the members of Congress themselves, I would think that the members will like it. As an aggregator, it’s also acting as a field leveler for those members with a smaller following. Just as Google News pulls up info from some obscure news sources and places them side by side with the more prominent ones. This also places more obscure members’ postings alongside the postings of more prominent members
Nice. Thank you for sharing.
Wired Magazine’s “Epicenter Blog” has launched an unofficial poll to let you vote for your favorite Apps for America entry. If you liked Legistalker – you can vote it up. We’re pretty excited that it’s the number one voted app right now – we hope the official judges agree 🙂
URL for the Wired poll: http://blog.wired.com/business/2009/04/choose-your-own.html