What is the Progressive Congress News?
Progressive Congress News is means for Congressional staff, Progressive activists, and mobile citizens who use VisibleVote to remain aware of policy issues and progress on legislation.
Congressional staff are absolutely inundated with information. The PCN system puts a layer of motivated volunteer editors between them and the flood, filtering news from a variety of source and protecting their time. If you could listen in to our conference calls you'd hear the phrase 'shadow staff' fairly regularly - a nod to the need for citizens to take control of the government away from lobbyists.
While staff need vetted, focused news in their inbox every morning, activists and interested citizens seek differing levels of information. PCN's open, Twitter/NetVibes/paper.li based newsroom architecture means that anyone can see what goes into making the final, distilled product. Editors are publicly listed for each area and they welcome interaction. Eventually every policy area will maintain a list of high value news sources and a daily paper.li will be created and promoted, recognizing the work of high value contributors.
We strive to apply the principle of attention conservation to everything we do. No animation, no flashy graphics, no crawling tickers, just simple text descriptions of what can be found on the other side of each link.
Americans are growing more interested in good government at the same time their own schedules grow more busy. We reached out to Visible Vote after meeting them at Netroots Nation 2010. Their mobile/Facebook application provides detailed information to subscribers on what legislation is pending and how their representatives have voted.
The system currently monitors Environment, Energy, Economy, Education, Labor, Immigration, Healthcare, LGBT Issues, and
National Security.
Planned expansions include transportation as well as specialty feeds for Communication Directors and Chiefs of Staff
If you'd like to know more about this system those behind it congregate on Twitter and most of them are listed on the editors tab of the main page. |
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