Transparency in government is key for a healthy representative democracy.
GovTrack.us is a nexus of information about the United States Congress. Bringing together information on the status of federal legislation, voting records, and other congressional data from official sources, and turning it into an understandable and trackable free information resource for everyday citizens, GovTrack aims to narrow the divide between the public and our government. This site serves as both a research tool as well as a customizable Congress-tracker, by providing email updates and RSS/Atom feeds for all aspects of Congress.
An independent, non-partisan, non-commercial website founded in September 2004, GovTrack.us was a 2006 Webby Award nominee and has been mentioned in both The New York Times and The Washington Post. GovTrack was inspired by other websites, such as Project Vote Smart and OpenSecrets, and even the commercial CapWiz, and when it was founded, GovTrack was unique in what it provided for free directly to the politically interested, civic-minded average Joe. Since then, other websites have followed in GovTrack’s footsteps, notably OpenCongress and The Washington Post’s vote database.
GovTrack indexes all bills in the Congress and all roll call votes. You can search bills by name, number, and subject, and can track bills and votes by RSS feeds. The full text of legislation shows the changes made to the bill through the legislative process and includes links directly to relevant parts of the United States Code.
Legislative events, like the introduction of a bill or the vote on a bill, are automatically categorized into thousands of subject areas, such as “nuclear energy” and “medicine,” so that users can subscribe to follow just the events that interest them. These events are sent to users on a daily or weekly basis by email, or through daily-updated RSS/Atom feeds. To get started, understand how to use “Trackers” or search bills by subject.
You can also use GovTrack to track your senators and representative. Start by finding your representatives with our Google Maps mash-up.
GovTrack believes information about the government should be free and open. In that spirit, all of the raw data that GovTrack collects and organizes is made available for others to reuse to create other projects; that is, to make the same information as useful and accessible as possible.
Global Integrity is an independent, non-profit organization tracking governance and corruption trends around the world. Global Integrity uses local teams of researchers and journalists to monitor openness and accountability.
Global Integrity meets the international community’s need for a trustworthy source of unbiased information on corruption and governance trends produced by an entity without partisan, ideological, or financial interests. Among other work, we produce the Global Integrity Report, a collection of original, in-depth national assessments combining journalistic reporting with 292 “Integrity Indicators” analyzing openness, governance, and anti-corruption mechanisms for a diverse collection of countries. Global Integrity aims to provide the public, the private sector, non-governmental organizations, and governments with an innovative set of information tools that diagnose, explain and analyze governance trends in a globalized world.
GovernmentDocs.org was created to advance the values of open and accountable government. This site gives the public an unprecedented level of access to government documents by allowing users to browse, search, and review hundreds of thousands of pages acquired through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and other public disclosure, or “sunshine,†laws.
With the GovernmentDocs.org system, citizen reviewers can engage in the government accountability process like never before. Registered users can review and comment on documents, adding their insights and expertise to the work of the national nonprofit organizations which are partnering on this project. This new information then becomes instantly searchable. The text of each document is searchable, as well, thanks to a powerful Optical Character Recognition (OCR) functionality.
GovernmentDocs.org adds a powerful layer to government transparency and accountability by indexing documents in a user-friendly manner that is remarkably easy to share. Every page of every document has its own unique url, allowing you and other users to link to that page on blogs, send emails about the documents to friends, and expose the information to a wider audience. Become a citizen reviewer today.
Data on participation of women in governmental bodies across the world.
From the IPU. The IPU is the international organization of Parliaments of sovereign States (Article 1 of the Statutes of the Inter-Parliamentary Union). It was established in 1889.
The Center for Public Integrity is a nonprofit organization dedicated to producing original, responsible investigative journalism on issues of public concern. The Center is non-partisan and non-advocacy. We are committed to transparent and comprehensive reporting both in the United States and around the world.
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