Web Projects
The projects below are open source efforts to bring the power of government information to the citizens of the United States with Internet technology. Open source projects are always looking for help, so get involved!
Federal - Legislative
GovTrack.us tracks the U.S. Congress and is a reference for pending legislation, votes, Members of Congress, congressional districts, and the congressional record. The database that powers the site is also made freely available. Dev Site
MetaVid is an interface to video streams from the House and Senate floors. The software behind the site is open source: MetaVidWiki is an extension of MediaWiki – the wiki-system powering Wikipedia – that enables community engagement with audio/visual media assets and associative temporal metadata.
Readable Laws is a wiki about making plain-language analyses of bills. It's not open "source" per se, but it is open content.
OpenCongress brings together the status of legislation with news articles, blog coverage, and social wisdom to present a comprehensive overview of what's happening in Congress. It is open-source Ruby on Rails, licensed under the GPL. Congresspedia, the citizen's encyclopedia about Congress, is merging with OpenCongress. Dev Site
politicianscoop is currently working to build a fast, clean alternative for finding information on the current U.S. politicians (Senators/Representatives). It's not open source, but it is free data.
Free Sheet Music is a good project that will allow people to find what they look for. unlike other projects, it is indeed free.
Sunlight Labs is the development arm of the Sunlight Foundation. They work on some APIs and several other cool projects, including their 50 States project.
watchdog.net is trying to build a hub for politics on the Internet. It's gathering congressional information now. The source code and data are open. Project Ideas
Federal - Executive
OpenRegulations.org is an alternative interface to the government's regulations.gov.
Federal - Judicial
AltLaw.org, "the free legal search engine", provides the first free, full-text searchable database of Supreme Court and Federal Appellate case reports. Development happens at lawcommons.org. AltLaw is a joint project of Columbia Law School’s Program on Law and Technology and the Silicon Flatirons Program at the University of Colorado Law School.
Federal & State Information Technology & Procurement
The government Information Technology Wiki, this site, known as the GovITwiki, tracks how government agencies are using information technology, what they spend on these solutions, and how they procure the solutions. It also looks at the major IT trends in government today, and how these affect system design and procurement decisions. Multiple agencies have provided data.
State and Local
Sunlight Labs's Fifty State Project: Scrape legislative data for all 50 states.
State and Local Government on the Net - Not open source, but free and without advertising (provided by Piper Resources). Attempts to link to websites of every government in every locality in the U.S.
Elections
Open Source Digital Voting Foundation is a community of technology and policy geeks, developing open source guidelines, specifications, and prototypes of high assurance digital voting systems and services.
