Joshua Tauberer, wizard and chief elf behind GovTrack.us, has added another layer of openness to a site that is pretty much see-through already. GovTrack, an independent tool to help the public research and track activities in the U.S. Congress, already provides its data and a programming interface. Recently, Josh released the site's source code - both the components that build the legislative database as well as the front-end components that build the site and display results.

Josh has been managing GovTrack single-handedly and, hoping to see involvement by other programmers and data crunchers, has prepared an initial list of project ideas. He has released the code under the GNU AGPL license thereby requiring code modifiers to make their modifications publicly available.

I was lucky enough to get to talk with Josh last month and he agreed to talk about GovTrack on video. Here he gives a brief description of GovTrack.us (40 sec).

Here he talks about open sourcing the site's code (46 sec).

Congress | GovTrack | Josh Tauberer | Legislation | Policycommons
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