The focus of GovTrack so far has been on providing comprehensive no-nonsense reference and tracking for legislative information. One of my long-term goals has been to build a community. Last year a GovTrack user asked me a procedural question about how Congress works: can members of Congress change their vote? (In the Senate, yes, with some restrictions.) It made me realize that there are many simple questions that people would like to ask about Congress or bills in Congress but have no one to turn to. Crowdsourcing could solve this problem. GovTrack users could gain from the wisdom of the crowd by having other users answer their questions. A user in the community might be an expert on a subject or be willing to do some legwork to find out the answers, such as reading the text of a bill.
And crowdsourcing worked. No sooner did I add question-and-answer boxes to pages for bills that visitors started asking questions and answering them. A visitor can post a question without logging in, as well as answer already posted questions. More than 7,500 substantive questions and answers have been posted over the past year (that’s about one interaction for every 1,000 visits to the site). The Q&A submissions are moderated to ensure that users stay on topic. One of the most-answered questions has been “How will this bill impact day traders who may trade dozens to hundreds of trades per day?”
Other community tools exist on the sites reusing GovTrack’s data. OpenCongress.org adds basic social networking, discussion forums, and a wiki. Represented By and Laws I Like are Facebook applications based on GovTrack data that let users track representatives and bills from within the social networking site.