User:Theretiredgymnast/sandbox

https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=GovTrack&action=edit - Article on gov track, this is a stub like an article and I could further expand it by drawing on news articles and credible resources. Moreover, Wikipedia says that this article is a stub so it would be ideal to work on.

My article on gov track will involve delving deeper into the company's origin. Some sources I will be using are news articles about the company. I will be referring to the New Yorker alongside some independent journalists. I will also reach out to company management and ask for references to certain articles and published research.

Primary improvements to make: 1. add more citations for verification of information presented 2. Add more paragraphs and categories such as talking about the origin of GovTrack, use of GovTrack etc 3. Transform article from stub to a strong source of information through in-depth research

Introduction: GovTrack.us is a website developed by then-student Joshua Tauberer and based in Washington, D.C., who launched it as a hobby.[1] It enables its users to track the bills and members of the United States Congress. Users can add trackers to certain bills. The website collects data on members of Congress, allowing the users to check voting records and attendance relative to peers.

Feedback: It was cited by Clyde Haberman in the New York Times,[2] and was mentioned as striving to help educate voters about legislation by The San Francisco Chronicle. The student wire service, University Wire said it was making it easy for people to learn about the government.[3][4] A survey conducted showed that GovTrack helped raise awareness amongst common citizens through their report card for each legislative year since 2013. Tauberer won a contest from Technorati for using GovTrack to link bills to the blog posts discussing them.[5]

Future Goals: GovTrack aims to create comprehensive open data about Congress. It lobbies with Congress to make more and better legislative information available to the public.GovTrack.us is a project of Civic Impulse, LLC, a completely independent entity which is wholly owned by its operator and receives no funding in any form from outside organizations. This enables it to maintain a neutral point of view. In the long run, it hopes to make legislations easily accessible and understandable to the general public.

GovTrack.us is a website developed by then-student Joshua Tauberer. It is based in Washington, D.C., and was launched as a hobby.[1] It enables its users to track the bills and members of the United States Congress. Users can add trackers to certain bills thereby narrowing the scope of the information they receive. The website collects data on members of Congress, allowing the users to check voting records and attendance relative to peers. It propagates the ideology of increasing transparency in the government and building better communication between the general public and the government.

Contents [hide] 1	Early Stages 2	Future Goals 3	Feedback 4	References 5	External links Early Stages[edit source] Joshua started govtrack.us when he was in college. The first topics the site covered were raising basic politic awareness by asking a simple question like if the white house and congress were different houses? The site has a long-term 15-year plan to "open the economy." In 2005, govtrack was the first to make U.S. federal legislative information comprehensively available in an open, structured data format for researchers, journalists, other public interest projects, and anyone to freely reuse for any purpose. Their data was the basis for dozens of other open government projects, including major projects of the Sunlight Foundation and investigative stories at major news publications, and continued until 2017, when the U.S. Congress began publishing open, structured data itself. 

Future Goals[edit source] GovTrack aims to create comprehensive open data about Congress. It lobbies with Congress to make more and better legislative information available to the public.GovTrack.us is a project of Civic Impulse, LLC, a completely independent entity which is wholly owned by its operator and receives no funding in any form from outside organizations. This enables it to maintain a neutral point of view. In the long run, it hopes to make legislations easily accessible and understandable to the general public. Data is divided into 5 main subsections.

Members of Congress	Biographical information and committee assignments for current and former Members of Congress are from the congress-legislators project, a community repository we originally developed and help maintain.

Photos are sourced from various locations, including the GPO Guide to House and Senate Members, and credited on individual legislator pages.

Bill Status	The status of pending legislative is retrieved daily from the U.S. Government Publishing Office (GPO) Federal Digital System (FDsys) Bill Status XML Bulk Data. Legislative activity typically appears the next business day. We use the open source Congress project to automate and simplify retrieving the data.

The ProPublica Congress API is the only public API for legislative information. The API was formerly the Sunlight Foundation Congress API and traces its history to our legislative data offerings back in 2010.

Prognosis scores (predictions of enactment) are from Skopos Labs.

Bill Summaries	Gov track display several sorts of bill summaries, including many that they write themselelves. Other summaries are from the Library of Congress’s Congressional Research Service (the same summaries on Congress.gov; we get them the same way we get bill status, see above) and the House Republican Conference.

Votes	Roll call votes are retrieved from the Senate and House websites in XML format. We update our vote data roughly hourly. We use the open source congress project to automate and simplify retrieving the data.

Missed and mistaken vote explanations are from ProPublica.

Bill Text The text of the legislation is retrieved from GPO.gov/FDSys in PDF, XML, and plain text formats. Govtrack uses the open source Congress project to automate and simplify retrieving the data, congressxml to render the XML as HTML, and linkify-citations to hyperlink legal citations in bill text. What’s Coming Up

Feedback[edit source] It was cited by Clyde Haberman in the New York Times,[2] and was mentioned as striving to help educate voters about legislation by The San Francisco Chronicle, and the student wire service University Wire said it was making it easy for people to learn about the government.[3][4]

A survey conducted showed that GovTrack helped raise awareness amongst common citizens through their report card for each legislative year since 2013.Tauberer won a contest from Technorati for using it to link bills to the blog posts discussing them.[5]

References[edit source] Jump up ^ "About GovTrack.us". Civic Impulse. Jump up ^ Haberman, Clyde (2008-05-20). "Fallibility, Wise Men and Politics". The New York Times. Jump up ^ Goldfarb, Zachary A. (2006-03-02). "Web site a pork hunting ground". San Francisco Chronicle. Jump up ^ Italic text'ms2/summary_0286-14454677_ITM "U. Penn grad student's Web site helps track new laws" Check |url= value (help). AccessMyLibrary.com. The America's Intelligence Wire. 2006-04-03. Jump up ^ "Developer's Contest Winners". Technorati. Archived from the original on 2008-02-19. External links[edit source] GovTrack homepage