(via: FCW.com)

Why Tuesday?, a cool new non-profit founded by New York attorney and civil rights activist Bill Wachtel, is using the capabilities of the Web 2.0 evolution to strengthen America's democratic process through increased voter participation. Founded in 2005, the group works to make election reform an issue politicians can't dodge. In an interview published this week by the LAist, Why Tuesday? executive director Jacob Soboroff says that their goal is to be the "woodpecker on the conscience of America", and advocate for making voting more secure, accessible and reliable. He says that they don't have the all the answers, but want to make sure election reform is an issue politicians, opinion leaders and ordinary citizens are talking about.

One way they do this is to encourage individuals to become correspondents...interview and video tape politicians on what they believe should be done to strengthen democracy and voting. They then ask the correspondent to post the video on their YouTube group.

The IBM Business for Government report on blogging is a very useful introduction to Web 2.0 and blogs for wary lawmakers, as Ellen notes below. I'm not sure when they made this report - I know I first read it a month or two ago - but if they were to update their list of members of Congress blogging they would see that congressional blogs are not only more widespread than they report, but are also growing quickly. I've been collecting information related to member Web sites and the type of content they post for some time now. Below the fold you'll find a full-ish list of congressional blogs. It's a lot longer than IBM and others have reported.

These blogs vary in quality from rarely updated and only press releases to a real online communications hub.

It's nice to have company among Foundations in understanding the potential of Web 2.0 for their grantees. The Overbrook Foundation recently undertook a study of its grantees' use of the Internet and founded mixed results, but a lot of interest by their grantees in getting up to speed. Most telling was this comment by one of the participants in the conversation: "I think I'm missing something really big, but I don't know what it is or how to find out what it is."

It's Overbrook's belief that the most effective organizations in the new digital age will be those who recognize these digital opportunities and quickly seize them.

We agree.

GovTrack.us is a perfect choice to be our first review as an Insanely Useful Website. GovTrack is one of the original web 2.0 type sources for government information: both an excellent example of a new model of political information distribution, and a compelling story of Web-programming genius expressed as an ambitious civic undertaking.

Josh Tauberer, Govtrack's creator and proprietor, has gone far beyond building a simple tool to help track congressional proceedings; Josh's creation has become a fundamental fixture in terms of both government information and structured data, a result of his extensive knowledge of both advanced linguistics, and computer programming. Josh's willingness to volunteer his expertise also led to him helping to form and author the recommendations of the Open House Project, a separate Sunlight project.

Here's Josh Tauberer briefly telling the story of Govtrack: (click below to play)

http://www.sunlightfoundation.com/files/mp3/govtrack.mp3

GovTrack's user oriented design and creative combinations of different data sources have garnered praise from notable sources, including Peggy Garvin, The New York Times, and The Washington Post, and also help make GovTrack useful for a variety of different users.

There's a lot more to this review; click below to keep reading...

When David All and I wrote in an Op-Ed for The Hill that “the time has come to re-imagine the world of the wired elected official,” I did not expect members of Congress to be so quick to pick up and use these new lines of communication. Halfway into the year more members of Congress are using their Web site to disseminate useful information and some, albeit very few, are actually communicating with citizens in meaningful two-way dialogue both on and off their member Web site. Perhaps the most innovative example of this is Sen. Dick Durbin’s effort to craft broadband legislation with the help of citizens online, which Ellen wrote about earlier today.

Senator Dick Durbin is crafting a bill online this week on universal broadband policy. I don't know if this effort is a first of its kind but I think it might well be.

Today I'm writing to invite you to participate in an experiment -- an interactive approach to drafting legislation on one of the most significant public policy questions today: What should be America's national broadband strategy? . . . There are two reasons I'm asking for your help and participation. The first is because I think we need more public participation and transparency in the way Congress crafts significant legislation. This is an approach to legislation that has never been tried before. If it's successful -- as I believe it will be -- it may become the way lawmakers approach drafting bills on other issues like education, health care, and foreign policy.

Now this is lawmaking in the sunlight!

We talk frequently about "Web 2.0" here at Sunlight. (Yes, we know that's a "buzzword" but it's a handy way of describing the new "read-write" culture of today's Web.) We think a lot about what it means for how Congress presents itself to and interacts with the public. Sunlight's fascinated by (some might say obsessed) with how the interactivity and transparency potential of the Internet can change the relationship between lawmakers and their constituents. How citizens can use the Internet to hold lawmakers more accountable for their votes, their earmarks, who they meet with, and what they say when debating legislation. (To wit, see what Rep. George Miller announced yesterday.) We use Web 2.0 "criteria" for our grant making, making sure that organizations we fund use the Internet in creative, interactive, and as a two-way street in their overall strategy. Even the databases we fund (arguably very Web 1.0 tools) have to be developed with the capacity to be exported in formats that others can use to mash different data sets together.