I was talking to Craig Lewiston today, and he showed me a little mac dashboard widget that he made. It just grabs an rss feed of congressional votes, as they happen (data comes from here, and has every vote back to 1991). We talked about adding a couple of features to make it more "interactive." Here they are:
You pick congress people you're concerned with (or it auto-detects your representatives given your location), and tags for issues you're interested in. It alerts you when there's a relevant vote, and tells you how your congress persons did... then with one click you can generate a partly templated email message to them that opens in your email client.
A refinement of this would be to find another source of data that alerts you to relevant votes BEFORE they happen, so you could send an email in advance. Maybe this should be a facebook application, so you could also have an easy way to propagate the relevant combo of upcoming vote/congress person/templated email to all your friends and get them to check it out too...
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