OpenCongress Launches New Citizen Engagement and Political Communication Tools

OpenCongress — the free, open source, U.S. federal legislative current awareness and eparticipation service, sponsored by the Participatory Politics Foundation and the Sunlight Foundation — has launched two new tools for enabling citizen engagement and political communication.

David Moore of the Participatory Politics Foundation — and a member of our community — is one of the developers of OpenCongress.

The two new OpenCongress tools are:

• Contact-Congress is a new online communication tool that lets citizens send an email message about an issue or a piece of legislation simultaneously to all three of their Members of Congress. Citizens can also share their letters with other citizens online, for purposes of follow-up, accountability, and organizing.
• MyOC Groups (or Open Congress Groups) is a new social network on the OpenCongress platform, in which citizens can organize themselves into groups to discuss political issues and legislation, share letters they have sent to Members of Congress, hold federal legislators accountable, and engage in political organizing.

For more information, please see the announcement on the OpenCongress Blog.

HT @ppolitics.

[Image courtesy of OpenCongress. Licensed CC BY-SA 3.0.]