At the Center for Technology and Civic Life we believe that our country is made stronger when all people are engaged in the democratic process. Ensuring that we each have the opportunity to be heard is the motivation behind everything we do at the Center. It’s why we work with election officials to help them publish information in accessible and easy-to-understand ways. It’s why we publish civic datasets that allow the public to answer basic questions about what will be on their ballot.

Contacting your representatives in Congress is one of the most fundamental ways to make your voice heard. Are you looking for ways to voice your opinion about executive orders, cabinet appointments, or pending legislation? Here are a few tools that can help:

• MyReps is a simple way of identifying your representatives and finding their contact information. MyReps is available as a standalone lookup as well as an embeddable widget that you can add to your website.
• Call Your Rep, specifically focused on Congress, provides contact information for each of your Senators’ and Representatives’ district offices.
• Beyond just calling, you can use tools like PopVox to track and weigh in on specific pieces of legislation.
• And The Town Hall Project 2018 helps you find out when your representatives will be taking questions from the public (and invites you to add information about upcoming meetings).

Many of these sites use our Governance Project data via the Google Civic Information API. This data is continuously updated, and we’re currently finishing the process of updating our city and county elected officials to reflect the results of November’s election.

Our work to increase communities’ access to the information needed for civic participation is key infrastructure for making our government more reflective and responsive.  If you want to use our dataset of elected officials for a project of your own, or if you have any questions about the data available, please drop us a line: [email protected]. If you spot an issue with the data that needs to be addressed, or would like us to collect any other data, please let us know that as well! We hope that our datasets, and the tools built on top of it, are useful pieces of infrastructure we can each use to engage in and protect our democracy.