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congress-contact
================
## Contacting Congress
What would it take to enable people and organizations who wish to enable the sending electronic written messages to Congress via the Web?
This project contains information on how to automatically and successfully submit the contact forms of members of Congress.
### Data Collection
This is what you need to power any system which aims to collect and submit electronic text from US citizens to their elected members of Congress.
1. **Contact form URLs.** There is no standard contact form URL for House or Senate MOCs.
* The [congress-legislators](https://github.com/unitedstates/congress-legislators) project contains this field, but it is only actively kept up to date for the Senate. The Senate, God bless them, [publishes this URL for every member in an XML document](https://www.senate.gov/general/contact_information/senators_cfm.xml).
* In rare cases, there may be a public email for a MOC. Right now, newly appointed Sen. Chiesa has an email of `mailto:Senator_Chiesa@Chiesa.Senate.gov` listed in the above XML.
* The House explicitly discusses the issue of public MOC emails and contact forms on [House.gov](http://www.house.gov/representatives/find/). The answer is: there's no central listing, up to each member.
**Current Status**
2. **How these forms are structured.** There is no standard form structure for House or Senate MOCs.
* It is likely the forms fall into different categories based on the MOC's underlying website vendor.
* Some forms require the submission of CAPTCHAs.
* It's possible the forms could be described in a declarative, crowdsourced format.
We're going through every member of the Senate and codifying their contact form structure into YAML files that follow a simple schema. The `/members` directory already contains a few examples, such as [this description](https://github.com/unitedstates/congress-contact/blob/master/members/B000575.yaml) of how to submit [Roy Blunt's contact form](http://www.blunt.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/contact-form?p=contact-roy).
3. **Ongoing maintenance.** The data collected for 1 and 2 should be expected to change at any time.
* There need to be enough invested parties that there are eyes and hands to quickly resolve changes.
* When a new Congress takes office in January of odd-numbered years, expect a high amount of entropy.
### Contributing
If you'd like to help:
### Sending Messages
* [File a ticket](https://github.com/unitedstates/congress-contact/issues/new) naming the Senator you're claiming.
* [Fork this repository](https://github.com/unitedstates/congress-contact/fork).
* Go visit that Senator's website, and fill out a new YAML file describing how to submit the form.
* Save this file in `/members` as `[bioguide].yaml`, where `[bioguide]` is that member's *Bioguide ID*.
* If you don't know their Bioguide ID: you can find it by visiting [bioguide.congress.gov](http://bioguide.congress.gov) and looking at the end of the URL for a given member. For example, Sen. Chiesa's profile at `http://bioguide.congress.gov/scripts/biodisplay.pl?index=C001100` means his Bioguide ID is `C001100`.
* When you're done, [submit a pull request](https://github.com/unitedstates/congress-contact/compare/) with the new file.
It's **not** proposed that this produce one central hosted service useful to any actor. Everyone's needs would be too different, and likely need to connect to existing databases, etc.
### FAQ
So any outcome here would be code generally useful to anyone wishing to integrate the collected data into their systems.
**Why just the Senate?**
This could mean anything from a stand-alone application whose interface is an HTTP API, to one or more language-specific "wrappers" that make it easy to work with the data (simulate form submission, etc.).
Several reasons:
* The Senate is a smaller target (100 members) than the House (441 members).
* Senate contact form URLs are officially and [centrally maintained](https://www.senate.gov/general/contact_information/senators_cfm.xml) in XML.
* Senate systems are less aggressive about rejecting letters by constituents thought not to be in their district.
* Senate membership itself has far less turnover, so long term data entropy is lower.
Once the Senate data is good, we'll look at moving on to the House.
**So I can drop my contract with `[vendor name here]`??**
This is just data. Even once we have data for everyone, you'll still need to build a system that **integrates** this data. There's nothing here for tracking and storing errors and mistakes, strategies for re-trying, or storing any sort of user data or success statistics.
But what you **won't** have to do is keep up with Congress' constantly shifting websites. That's what this project does.
**Submitting the contact form isn't enough. How do I get other data about members of Congress?**
You can find detailed, reliable data about every current and historical member of Congress at the [unitedstates/congress-legislators](https://github.com/unitedstates/congress-legislators) project.
The data in that project, also stored as YAML, is easily connect-able to this project via the `bioguide` ID field.
### Who's doing this
* The Sunlight Foundation is in the process of collecting this data and integrating it into [OpenCongress.org](http://www.opencongress.org).