We are excited to share an announcement from House Democratic Whip Steny Hoyer [D-MD-5] that the internal House Democratic intranet, DemCom, now pulls all organization positions posted on POPVOX directly into its system.
(From the press release🙂
"I believe that it is important for Congress to adopt new technologies that advance our constitutional mission of communicating with our constituents. Websites like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube have significantly transformed how Americans share information, and most Members of Congress have adopted these technologies resulting in improved constituent communications. Government initiatives like President Obama’s Data.gov and ‘We the People’ also use new web technologies to advance the important goals of government transparency, accountability, and participation of the people.
"POPVOX is an innovative, nonpartisan website that provides citizens and organizations across the country a new forum to publicly speak out on specific legislation that is before Congress. Today, we are recognizing that innovation by ensuring that when a citizen or organization takes a position publicly on a bill, that position will be displayed to House Democrats and their staff."
Minority Whip Steny Hoyer
This integration was built using a POPVOX API and our widgets (which you must be logged in to see).
What this means for organizations is that posting your organization's position on pending bills on POPVOX goes a long way to getting your position in front of staffers. This is a first step in what we hope are really big things to come for the wider use of the API (for both sides, both chambers, media and the general public).
Please let us know at info@popvox.com if you would like more information.
Here's how it works.
When an organization posts a bill position on POPVOX, that position is both displayed publicly on the bill's POPVOX page but also shared through a POPVOX API, which allows other websites to better access this data. Using this API and POPVOX widgets, the official intranet for House Democratic staff, DemCom, will now dynamically pull all organization positions — support and opposition — directly from POPVOX for every bill pending before Congress. Public sentiment for bills registered on POPVOX will also be displayed on DemCom through our new map widget, which we encourage you to use on your website as well. (Get the map widget.)
