The nonprofit Sunlight Foundation announced today the availability of its Real Time Congress iPhone app. The app displays an up-to-the-minute feed of updates from the House and Senate floors, Whip notices, hearings scheduled and key government documents as they are released.
Unfortunately all this information is displayed quite simply; there is as of yet no deep personalization as in Sunlight’s years-old and fabulous OpenCongress project, there’s no search and the app doesn’t make use of the iPhone’s push capabilities. It’s not a bad start, but there is a lot of potential for an iPhone app to make Congressional activity a much more engaging part of peoples’ day-to-day lives.
Asked about push notifications, Josh Ruihley, Sunlight’s Technical Program Officer told us. “It’s definitely on the road map. Currently, every document, hearing and floor update you see in the app is tagged by the piece of legislation it is related to. Our next phase is to actually represent those relationships in the UI.”
