OpenCongress makes it easier to understand, track, and engage with Congress. OpenCongress combines official government data with news and blog coverage, social networking, and participation tools to give you the real story behind what's happening in Congress. OpenCongress is a public-mission project with the following principles ::
- Free of charge to everyone and non-commercial (e.g., no advertisements, no commercial sponsors)
- Open-source (our "libre" web code is openly licensed under the GPL)
- Open standards (our structured data is available for bulk download and accessible via API)
- Not-for-profit (our site is an educational resource for the public good)
- Non-partisan (we are independent from any political party and candidate)
- "Copyleft" (our site content is free to share, reuse, and remix in ways compliant with our licensing (as of July 2011, under AGPLv3, subject to change)
- Free culture (our sibling non-profit, PCF, works for a fairer and more democratic media space, against corporate gatekeepers)
- For net neutrality (we advocate for internet freedom and the broadest possible public access online, against current corporate telco lobbying policies)
- For fair elections (we stand with Fix Congress First in calling for full public financing of all federal elections and a new Constitutional convention for comprehensive electoral reform)
- Against systemic corruption (in addition to traditional quid-pro-quo corruption, we oppose our current system by which the major institution of the U.S. government is regularly captured or dominated by moneyed interests through campaign contributions and lobbying)