POPVOX’s “Write Congress” Tool Implemented by House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform

The U.S. House of Representatives’ Committee on Oversight and Government Reform last week implemented POPVOX’s “Write Congress” tool, a widget enabling citizens to send email messages about legislation to members of Congress, according to Miranda Neubauer’s TechPresident post entitled House Oversight Committee To Implement New Contact-Congress Tool.

According to the post, the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee is the first congressional committee to implement POPVOX‘s “Write Congress” widget.

According to the post, the Committee is implementing the “Write Congress” widget on the following bills: H.R. 2146, H.R. 459, H.R. 4607, H.R. 4155, and H.R. 4078.

For more information, please see the complete post.

Suhaka and Tauberer on Business Models for Reuse of Open Legislative Data

Karen Suhaka of LegiNation and Dr. Joshua Tauberer of GovTrack gave a “lightning talk” presentation entitled Legislative Transparency: A Round Up of Efforts and Results to Date (featuring this GoogleDoc spreadsheet on Open Gov Business Models) at IOGDC 2012 Virtual Conference: International Open Government Data Conference, 7 July 2012.

Part of the presentation concerned descriptions and examples of several different business models for using or reusing legislative and other government data. The legislative examples included:

• BillTrack50 (an example of the “Freemium” business model)
• GovTrack (“Advertising”)
• LexisNexis (“Pay services”)
• POPVOX (“Startup”)
• Sunlight Foundation (“Nonprofit”)
• THOMAS (“Government”)

The authors invite you to contribute additional business models and examples of use and reuse of open government data, to their GoogleDoc spreadsheet.

HT @Smoodle.

Marci Harris Profiled by BlogHer

Marci Harris of POPVOX is the subject of a recent profile at BlogHer, in an article by Kathryn Finney entitled Marci Harris is Changing How We Talk to Congress.

The article describes Harris’s transition from working as a Congressional staff person to co-founding and leading POPVOX, an innovative eparticipation and open legislative data service.

Harris Named One of The 100 Most Creative People in Business, by Fast Company

Marci Harris of POPVOX has been named one of The 100 Most Creative People in Business, by Fast Company, the entrepreneurship magazine.

The article notes that within 1 year of its founding, “Popvox reache[d] 100,000 users across every Congressional district” and won the “SXSW Microsoft Bizspark Accelerator Competition.”

Please join me in congratulating Marci!

Harris Wins 2012 Tribeca Disruptive Innovation Award

Marci Harris of POPVOX has won a 2012 Tribeca Disruptive Innovation Award.

The award citation reads:

Harris introduced an innovative, distributed solution for online, grassroots advocacy. The platform[, POPVOX,] organizes citizens around important issue, disrupting the traditional lobbying industry.

The award is granted by the Tribeca Film Festival, Professor Clay Christensen of Harvard Business School, and the Disruptor Foundation.

The awards will be formally given on 27 April 2012 at NYU Stern School of Business in New York, New York, USA.

Please join me in congratulating Marci!

Tauberer: Open Government Data: The Book

Dr. Joshua Tauberer of GovTrack has published Open Government Data: The Book (Civic Impulse LLC, 2012).

The book is available in a free Web version, as a for-fee Kindle ebook, and as a for-fee print book from Lulu.

Here is the abstract:

This book is about the principles behind the open government data movement and its development in the United States. The movement is framed as the application of Big Data to civics, where Big Data is not just the size of data but the ability for data to change the way we understand its subject. Topics include principles of open government data, the history of the movement, applications to transparency and civic engagement, a brief legal history, data quality, civic hacking, and paradoxes in transparency.

This book is organized into chapters covering the movement and its history, examples and a typology of open government data applications, a brief legal history of open government data, principles and recommendations for creating open government data, and limitations in the use of data for government transparency. The appendix includes excerpts of open data policy language and model language.

The book includes substantial discussion of legal open government data and legislative information systems.

Tauberer on Open Legislative Data

Dr. Joshua Tauberer of GovTrack and POPVOX has posted his House Legislative Data and Transparency Conference presentation, entitled “Data Impact and Understandability”: click here for the text; click here for the slides.

Click here for video of the presentation (scroll down).

(Click here for other presentations, posts, video, and resources related to the conference.)

He has also posted his public comment, submitted this week to the House Appropriations Committee, Subcommittee on the Legislative Branch: “On Bulk Data for Legislative Information.”

HT @JoshData.

Anderson on Adding Citizen Engagement Functions to Free Access to Law Sites

Kerry Anderson of the African Legal Information Institute (AfricanLII) has posted Social Wrapper for the Law: An Introduction, at the AfricanLII Blog.

In this post, Ms. Anderson calls for the addition of citizen-engagement functions to the many free-access-to-law sites now available in Africa. She writes:

My initial sense is that we a) need to allow users to contribute feedback on all aspects of the case law and legislation available; b) allow the user to select how structured or unstructured that feedback should be; c) identify who our users might be; d) have a mechanism for collating the resulting feedback in a format which an academic researcher would be able to tailor into a format which can be presented to governing bodies; e) expand our network so we have the right people presenting the information to the right governing bodies.

As examples of citizen-engagement functionality, Ms. Anderson cites “initiatives in the US, in Morocco and in Egypt that are fostering crowd-sourcing for constitutional reform,” discussed recently by Dr. Meritxell Fernández-Barrera at VoxPopuLII; and POPVOX, Dr. Joshua Tauberer and Marci Harris‘s legislative citizen-engagement site which “allows users to choose to support or oppose new bills and share the information with Congress.”

Ms. Anderson invites readers “to contribute links to any other such initiatives of which you know.” (Click here to register at AfricanLII for purposes of commenting on Ms. Anderson’s post.)

For more information, please see the complete post.

HT @Andrew_Rens.

Tauberer on Legislative Information Systems for Civic Engagement

Dr. Joshua Tauberer of GovTrack and POPVOX has published Inventing open government, in XRDS: Crossroads: The ACM Magazine for Students, December 2011.

[The article appears in a special issue of XRDS: Crossroads on the topic, "Computer Science in Service of Democracy", edited by Peter Kinnaird of Carnegie Mellon University. Click here for Mr. Kinnaird's preface to the special issue.]

In his article, Dr. Tauberer describes the development and functionality of POPVOX, a legislative information service that enables citizen engagement and provides context and current awareness respecting pending U.S. federal legislation.

Dr. Tauberer also discusses how POPVOX exemplifies the benefits of open government data, and demonstrates how civil society organizations can innovate with that data in ways that aid citizens and improve democracy.

POPVOX seems to exemplify the benefits of open government data predicted by David Robinson, Harlan Yu, et al., in their influential article, Government Data and the Invisible Hand.