Lum said it was ok to post about this. An e-friend of mine has been working on a website/app/mobile website thing for the past few months. I am now pimping it on these forums. He told me it was ok to share it a bit, but not to spread it too wide as it's still essentially a beta. I figured BF would the place most interested in it. The site/app/mobile site is pretty much a cross between a traditional poll done by pollsters and one of those fun (or childish depending on your view) sites where you get asked questions and see how you line up with other people. It's currently quite basic, the site at the moment has been designed for phones and a desktop browser site is coming in the next few weeks. It lets someone browse through issue headings and vote on them. The issue headings break down into political news polling questions that you can answer, and then you can see the results of the poll after voting. You can also change the settings of the results so to see results colour co-ordinated based on state, age, gender, party lines, etc. The guys making it are trying to stay neutral on how things are presented. Obviously they want it to be a success and a financial success but a lot of their motivation was presenting political issues in a fun way, that would hopefully get people involved. And as a way of presenting some of the things that would currently go unnoticed but are still quite important. I guess it's a little bit gamification as well as silly-quiz, if you want to make comparisons to pop culture. This is what the guy I know had to say about it, he did pretty much all the coding for it. http://govpop.com
Interesting. I don't understand how it will be the "Wikipedia of US politics" when the only information it provides is an extraordinarily brief and context-free summary of issue or the intended effects of the bill, and an option to email the bill to yourself. I get that they don't want to editorialize, but some context and info would be good. Links to Thomas http://thomas.loc.gov/ (or heck, wikipedia) might be useful. Including the bill number would also help. :) I felt woefully underinformed when I voted on a couple of them, but I also didn't want to take the time to search for info before voting on a casual app. The poll is easy to navigate and appears to work well. (There's a bit of proofreading needed, such as offers to "send the bill to your email" or "do you approve of this bil" when it's not a bill but a more amorphous issue.) I like the Twitter feed.
I think they're planning to redo the info about each bill with a bit more information. I know a few of their plans and they have things lined up to add to the information side of things (or at least they did when I talked to them about it a few months ago.) I'll pass on the bit about the typos and bill-categorisation. Thanks MrsWidget. I'm really hopeful for this, the guy involved in it I know is really good person and I think this has a lot of potential.
An interesting idea, I guess. This is more useful though: https://www.popvox.com/ and for information on what Congress is up to, there's this: http://www.govtrack.us/
