GovTrack.us for Capitol Hill Staff
We're here for you too! Although GovTrack considers itself a part of the open-government community, our goals of making comprehensive legislative tracking easy and of educating the public mean even staff for Members of Congress are a part of GovTrack's community. We hope we can work together.
Just some background...
GovTrack is a lot like THOMAS or LIS. Except, it's better.
Lately the site is visited by some 20,000 people each day. It was launched in 2004, is totally non-partisan, and is independently run with no source of ongoing external funding. GovTrack is ad-supported but is otherwise non-commercial. (More about the site.)
Why you might find it useful
There are a few things on GovTrack you might find useful as a Hill staffer.
We have interactive congressional district maps. You can zoom in to individual streets to see precise district boundaries.
Our bill text view is pretty good. For this you'll have to search for a bill, such as H.R. 1. The coolest thing is you can compare versions of bill text as it goes through the legislative process. Comparisons can be made between any two versions of the bill posted by GPO: changes between the versions are highlighted. The bill text page also turns references to the U.S. Code into links to the text of the U.S.C., and you can make direct permanent links to particular paragraphs in the text.
One of the reasons the site was created was to make RSS feeds for everything going on in Congress. There are feeds for each Member of Congress (find the Member to get to the feed), for each bill (find a bill), and for various other activities in Congress. You use a feed by subscribing to it with a feed reader, such as Google Reader. You can also have the events that come up in the feeds sent to you each night or weekly.
For web developers
If you run the website of a Member of Congress, you might be interested in the bill status or events widgets. You can also embed congressional district maps on your website: see the bottom of the widgets page for more.
In the future
We'd like to help you get your message out. You might want to check out the Q&A feature on the pages for the bills your Member has sponsored to see what kinds of questions the GovTrack community has about the legislation. (Maybe you can answer some of the questions too!) We're also considering how we might be able to help you get your message out by tieing bills to your position statements on them.
If you have any thoughts or suggestions, don't hesitate to contact GovTrack by email.
