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Contacting Congress

This project contains information on how to automatically submit messages via the contact forms of members of Congress.

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.

Current Status

[✓] Create a standardized YAML data format for describing legislator contact forms.
[✓] Create a bookmarklet to make it easy to generate YAML files.
[✓] Make a testing suite to error-check generated files.
[✓] Create YAML files for almost all 100 members of the Senate.
[ - ] Create YAML files for almost all 439 members of the House of Representatives.
[ - ] Tested files.

Contributing

Due to the large quantity of House representatives, we need all the help we can get to complete this dataset. Please visit our contribution guide for a full description of how to contribute, but in brief:

Reply to an open ticket stating that you are currently working on a congress member's form.
Use the bookmarklet to generate a new YAML file.
Save the genearted file in /members as [bioguide].yaml, where [bioguide] is that member's Bioguide ID.
Submit a pull request with the new file.
Test the YAML file using congress-forms-test and make changes to the file as necessary.

You can also check out the schema we're using to represent the steps involved in filling out a member's web form.

FAQ

Why is this important?

As of now the only way to send electronic messages to members of Congress is to directly visit each legislator's contact form, or to use a proprietary third party vendor on an advocacy organization's website. The contact forms are cumbersome and difficult to use and the third party vendors are expensive. For simpler and cheaper tools for contacting legislators to exist, we've created an open data format that describes their contact forms.

This dataset will be a foundation that'll allow open government and advocacy organizations to create tools to allow users to email Congress.

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 project. The data in that project, also stored as YAML, is easily connect-able to this project via each member's Bioguide ID.

Who's doing this

The Sunlight Foundation will be integrating it into OpenCongress.org.
The Electronic Frontier Foudnation will be using the data with their congress-forms delivery implementation to advocate for better technology laws and regulations.
Taskforce.is will be using the data for technology-related activism campaigns.

Public domain

This project is dedicated to the public domain. As spelled out in CONTRIBUTING:

The project is in the public domain within the United States, and copyright and related rights in the work worldwide are waived through the CC0 1.0 Universal public domain dedication.

All contributions to this project will be released under the CC0 dedication. By submitting a pull request, you are agreeing to comply with this waiver of copyright interest.

Member Status Log

These graphics are pulled in near-real-time from http://opencongress.org and from based on the last letter sent to each member through OpenCongress' contact tools.

You can use them to see at a glance how a particular contact form's formula is doing, and click the image for a failing form to see the error it generated. While the errors are specific to the formageddon implementation OpenCongress uses, the first line will likely contain some useful information--the form url was a 404, a selector wasn't found, etc.

Note: These are lagging indicators and should be checked against the repo's recent activity, meaning sometimes a form can be fixed but either not yet imported to OpenCongress, or just that no one has tried to contact that member since their form was fixed.

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