Contacting Congress

This project contains information on how to automatically and successfully submit 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

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 of how to submit Roy Blunt's contact form.

Contributing

Read our contribution guide for a fuller description.

But more briefly, if you'd like to help:

• File a ticket naming the Senator you're claiming.
• Fork this repository.
• Check out the schema we're using to represent the steps involved in filling out a member's web form.
• 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 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, and so his file would be placed at /members/C001100.yaml.
• When you're done, submit a pull request with the new file.

Suggestions on making this process easier are quite welcome.

FAQ

Why just the Senate?

Several reasons:

• The Senate is a smaller target (100 members) than the House (441 members).
• Senate contact form URLs are officially and centrally maintained in XML.
• Senate systems are less aggressive about rejecting letters by constituents thought not to be in their district.

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 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 is in the process of collecting this data and integrating it into OpenCongress.org.