Call on Congress, a new, free service that provides access to U.S. federal legislative data by telephone, has been launched by the Sunlight Foundation, according to the post by Nicko Margolies entitled Announcing Call on Congress: Bringing Capitol Hill to Any Phone, on the Sunlight Foundation Blog.
According to the post, Call on Congress provides the following information:
- Members of Congress can be identified “by ZIP code”.
- For each Member of Congress, the service provides “a short biography, [names of] top campaign donors, recent votes,” “contact information for [his or her] local election office,” and “the ability to transfer your call directly to [his or her] office”
- Legislation can be identified “by bill number”
- For each bill, the service provides a summary “and news about any recent or upcoming actions.”
Information is provided in English, Spanish, or Esperanto.
According to Jeremy Carbaugh‘s post, The Tech Behind Call on Congress, the law-related data provided by Call on Congress comes from the following sources:
- Member lookup by ZIP code and contact information is powered by our Congress API.
- Bill information comes from the Real Time Congress API.
- Campaign contributions and member biographies are provided by the Influence Explorer API.
- Our friends at TurboVote are responsible for the API that allows us to provide information about local election offices.
In addition, the Call on Congress software is “open source and available on GitHub.”
For more information, please see Announcing Call on Congress: Bringing Capitol Hill to Any Phone and The Tech Behind Call on Congress.
Tags: Call on Congress, Jeremy Carbaugh, Legislative information systems, Mobile devices and legislative information systems, Mobile phones and legislative information systems, Open legislative data, Sunlight Foundation, Sunlight Labs
