Check out the new user home page. (Just Login and you will be redirected there, if you already are logged in, click on your username.) You can now upload a photo and profile which is visible to the public. You can hide your notes and bill watch lists using the privacy settings under the ‘edit’ tab. More to come…
BillHop’s userpage v.05 is up. Just login and you will immediately be taken to your personal page where you can track quickly scan the news headlines of any state in the billhop system (which is now just Texas and U.S. Congress, but will include many others here very shortly), view all the bills, bill status and issue pages which you have selected to track, and also read any notes you have written for any bill or issue page.
I’m labeling this v.05 because there are many more features which will be added to personalize your billhop experience enabling better legislative tracking and social networking. At the moment, your page is for your eyes only. No other user will be able to see your bills or notes. However, we will be adding public components so that you can meet and communicate with other BillHop folks.
You will also notice the cred and token count at the top of the page. These are simply metrics monitoring how much you’ve contributed to the site. The more you contribute, the more creds and tokens you receive. Creds allow you to increase the amount of control you have over the sites features. Tokens are BillHop currency that you can give to other BH users for their contributions to the site. There will be a lot more on both of these items in the weeks to come….
I’m convention watching this week, taking it easy after a quick vacation to the U.K. (and a temporary reprieve from working on BillHop), where the Brits were very pleased with their fourth place / near third place finish in the gold medal count in Beijing. Interestingly, they attribute their success to a politician - former Prime Minister John Major, whose term was unfortunately sandwiched between two of the largest personas of British politics– Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair. During his lackluster tenure as Prime Minister, Major evidently had the foresight to direct more money from the national lottery towards producing new Olympic talent. It paid off for the Brits, producing 19 gold medals. Cheers to you team G.B. and cheers to the ‘Grey’ Prime Minister for leaving some legislative legacy for the British to benefit from.
Back here in the U.S., I’m sure anyone with an ounce of political blood flowing through their veins is tuned into convention month. I don’t need to reiterate that Barack Obama provided quite a stirring speech last night. As someone who is interested in opening up the political process, and empowering people to affect the lawmaking process the, he hit on a key theme for me. The future of American politics will be underpinned by the ever-increasing impact that citizens will have on the entire process.
I know, I know. That wasn’t the key theme of the evening, but that was a theme that hit a chord for me.
Whether you are Republican, Democrat, Green, Libertarian or Independent, I hope you join me and the BillHop team in celebrating the notion of a more people-centered democracy and help us make it a reality both in our corner of the blogosphere and in your communities. The goal of this site is to empower you- regardless of your political affiliation- to understand the process and have an impact on the decisions of your elected officials.
Stay tuned for new BillHop features to be released by mid-Republican convention week. There’s still lots to be done.
As you may have noticed, we’ve been working out a few bugs in the new BillHop system over the last couple of weeks. Just to update you on what’s been repaired and improved: we fixed a bug that some people were encountering during login; the edit functions for Internet Explorer users are now completely up to speed; adjustments have been made to make the content from our old system more compatible in the new and improved AJAX site; and finally the automatic bill uploader is back online. (If you want to add a new bill to the BillHop system, just search for it by bill number in the search box. If we haven’t already added it, BillHop will add it for you automatically.)
If you encounter a bug, please let us know by emailing “Hop” at-the-BillHop-website.
With Congress in recess and the Texas Legislature in its interim break, there’s not much going on legislatively, but we hope you do check back in to the site periodically. We have a powerful new news clipping service which will expand as the site grows to include other states, and there’s always more info to find from our issues and bill pages from previous sessions. In September, we hope to launch quite some new cool collaborative tools, and watch for our expansion to several new legislative bodies from around the U.S.
Enjoy the Olympics and the last third of your summer. As always, if you have any comments or suggestions for the site, please contact us at the email above.
BillHop made an appearance at the Netroots conference this weekend with a booth in the exhibition hall. It was great to introduce the site to so many people from around the country who are interested in becoming more involved in their government. I even had the opportunity to meet some folks who first signed up for BillHop back in 2007 when we were first launched.
As I mentioned at the conference, we’re on track to have some powerful new tools loaded into the site by the beginning of Fall- well before the 2009 legislative sessions. The first new item: a new social networking tool, so that users can keep track on their legislative tracking, and their notes while also keeping tabs on fellow users of the site.
Let me know what you want to see, and we’ll do what we can to incorporate those ideas in the new site design.
After a brief hiatus, BillHop is back live and better than ever. We do apologize for the delay between our Beta testing year and version 2.0. Quite a bit of revising to the code and database structure to make the site sustainable going into the future.
You will notice that we only have BillHop Texas up. Congress will be up shortly, and we hope to follow with the states we used for Beta testing: Ohio, Arizona, California and Maryland.
There are quite a few cool new tools to show you in the near future. So be sure to check back in to check them out.