Congress: There's An (Android) App For That
- Written by
- Eric
- Date
- 11/16/2009 11:14 a.m.
Our Android app, "Congress", is now published in the Android Market, for free. As I said in the beta release post, Congress is a pocket Congressional directory that takes full advantage of the Sunlight Labs API. You can install it by visiting the Market, or scan the QR code in this post to take you right there.
The features:
- Up-to-date info about members of Congress.
- Find members of Congress by using your phone's location, a zipcode, a last name, or a state.
- Read tweets and watch videos from members' Twitter and YouTube accounts.
- Reply to a member of Congress on Twitter from within the app, using your own account.
- Read the latest news about them, using the Yahoo News API.
- Create desktop shortcuts to individual members of Congress.
The app's featureset is currently fairly minimal, but it serves as a foundation for bringing in a great deal of information about Congress. I hope to continue growing it to include real-time floor activity, voting history, fundraising information, information on specific legislation, and documents surrounding legislation.
The app's code is open source, hosted on Github. There aren't a ton of open-source Android apps out there, so I hope it's of some use to any beginning Android developers out there dealing with the learning curve. You can also report any bugs or feature requests there, as we're using Github for issue tracking. As always, we welcome feedback on how useful you find the app, and what you'd like to see.
Discussion
What are Your Thoughts?
Have thoughts that might fuel this discussion further, post them below. (Markdown syntax is supported in comments.)
This is awesome and thanks for the QR code - that's really handy!
So first impressions: presence of a name in a news story not too helpful unless excerpt is text around name, could use a newsfeed type display for multiple congress people, maybe something that displayed on the home page! Cool idea, lots of room for open source folks to develop it!
Agreed about the news excerpt, but unfortunately I'm limited by what the Yahoo News API gives me.
I like the idea of a combined feed of what's new for specific Congresspeople you've chosen to follow. Being able to "star" legislators is something that was in my original design for the app, but it got put aside during development. I've also thought about proactive notifications for news mentions for user-chosen legislators.
Check out this other API that could solve that Yahoo problem, I'm writing about it (and your app here as an example) under embargo until 7am EST Tuesday. Would love to see it work.
Is there interest in adding voting records into this application as well? I was thinking of playing with that for the Hack for America Day in the next couple of weeks. But I didn't want to step on anyone's toes if someone was either already working on it, or if there wasn't an interest in having it integrated into the main application.
I'm definitely interested in that being part of the app, but I haven't begun working on it yet, and probably won't until at least after the Hackathon Day. Those would be highly welcome contributions!
Looks great!
One question for us citizens that go to their offices to champion our fave bill. Will it eventually have access to the congressional directory? Like office locations (building, room #)? Double points if it also has a single page listing who is in what office representing where and then has links to that person's page.
We have office locations in the Sunlight API, it'd be easy to add them in, I just prioritized the screen space for other things. If I get more requests for it I'm happy to throw it in somewhere.
New features like legislation and voting history are going to require some rethinking of the UI anyway, at which point space won't be so much of a premium.
This app is great. Thanks for doing this.
Yes, good job with using the screen real-estate!
More info is always better. From when I have gone on citizen lobby trips the most important pieces of information were picture (if you run into them in the hall), name, office location, state represented and party. Telephone numbers are handy if you want to make an advance appointment. Generally bios/causes they care about/commitees/etc are on their websites. Usually you can make a guess what they will be interested in: like dems more favorable to civil rights legislation or bills that obviously benefit their state.
I can't wait until this incorporate state governments as well. Let me know if you need help with information on state representatives in Texas.
Is the Congressional app suitable for the windows pocket PC? My staff uses HTC touch pro2. Thanks.
Raul
Raul - no, this app is for the Android OS only.
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