GovTrack
GovTrack.us is a website developed by then-student Joshua Tauberer. It is based in Washington, D.C., and was launched as a hobby. 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 users to check members' voting records and attendance relative to their peers. It propagates the ideology of increasing transparency in the government and building better communication between the general public and the government. The website was briefly  on pause in September 2020 in protest of President Trump's refusal to commit to a peaceful transition of power ("win, lose or draw") regarding the 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. Early stages. Tauberer started govtrack.us when he was a student at Princeton University. The first topics the site covered were raising basic politic awareness by asking a simple question like whether the White House and Congress were different branches. 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. 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. In the long run, it hopes to make legislation easily accessible and understandable to the general public. Data is divided into five main subsections: Feedback. GovTrack was cited by Clyde Haberman in "The New York Times", and was mentioned as striving to help educate voters about legislation by "The San Francisco Chronicle". The student wire service University Wire said the site was making it easy for people to learn about the government. A survey conducted showed that GovTrack helped raise awareness among common citizens through their report card  for each legislative year since 2013. Tauberer won a contest from Technorati for using the site to link bills to the blog posts discussing them.