Site Updates: Spring 2012

A lot’s been happening here at GovTrack over the last few months. Here’s a quick run-down of the most recent changes:

• If you use GovTrack to build lists of items to track, the Your Lists page has gotten a much needed visual refresh. It also now provides RSS feed links for each of your lists (which we had in the old GovTrack but hadn’t yet brought over). Finally, note that Your Lists has now been tucked inside a new Track menu at the top of the page.
• We’ve put up a new page called Other Tools in the new Track menu featuring other ways you can track Congress besides using GovTrack.
• Bill pages have been slightly reorganized. They now highlight the major votes on bills so you can find the votes you are looking for faster. We’re also now starting to include links to news articles for bills.
• The Washington Post used our legislative data in an analysis of stocks being traded by Members of Congress published today, showing that conflicts of interest are pervasive.
• A lot of bugs have been fixed, e.g. voting absentee rates were missing for Barack Obama‘s time as a senator.
• The ordering of bills in the advanced search results has been improved with our “special sauce” that brings bills you’re probably looking for to the top.
• We’ve had a few great press mentions lately: check out the full list.
• For developers, we have a new experimental API to complement our bulk data downloads. And since launching the API we added to it information on roll call votes. The developer documentation has been improved.

We recently announced:

• We added legislative tracking for all 50 states. This feature is beta right now and will be developed over time. More in our announcement. (State information is made available through a partnership with LegiNation, Inc. and LegiScan, Inc.)
• Earlier this month the House’s bill to fund its own operations for 2013 almost rolled back transparency. Our advocacy effort was covered on the front page of The Washington Post. More in our blog post.

And coming up:

• You may notice that bill text comparisons are coming back. Our automatic red-lining feature is better than ever. I’ll write separately on this in a few weeks, since right now there are still some bugs to take care of.