README

CongressSpaceBook - a opensource web application designed to make it easy to deploy websites that focus on striving to make Congress more accountable and transparent...

Developed for: App For America http://sunlightlabs.com/appsforamerica/ this contest has ended. I didn't win but will continue to develop the site. Because I'm striving to make Congress more accountable and transparent!

Mission/Goal - Help ensure Congress and the President keep their promises of more transparency. By exposing the congress person spending habits, voting record and show who influences them and how much they are spending to do so. We track the Bills introduced, enacted, and co-sponsored for each congress person.

Target audience - Those who now expect transparency from our elected officials.

Technical Description - A social networking platform where the only members networking are Congress members.

- Developer / Site maintainer: Chauncey Thorn
- $email = $this->chaunceyt->gmail->com();

- Powered by: MASHUP::Keyword and Sunlight Labs data
- takes advantage of state-of-the-art XML webservices i.e. Google, Yahoo, Flickr, YouTube
- Govtrack.us, OpenSecrets, FedSpending, Capitol Words, Sunlight Labs and a number of others..
- Environment: Linux, Apache2, Mysql 5, PHP 5.2.x + Zend CakePHP Framework MVC
- Framework: I first developed this site using Zend however I prefer the CakePHP Framework's MVC pattern but, still use Zend components!
- News results provided by Yahoo, Google, Technorati
- Music tagclouds provided by Audioscrobbler
- Video results provided by Youtube
- Photos results provided by Yahoo / Flickr
- Blog Comment results provided by Backtype / FriendFeed
- Events results provided by Eventful
- GeoIP/Geocity Lite results used to tailor search results to ip location if possible

This code is primary for transparency. It has a number of dependencies that are not in the REPO.
I rsync govtrack.us/data/