Show HN: I built a website that simplifies Congress and its activities

I'm the Legislative Director for a nonprofit and my first observation of this tool is that I have no clue what it does. I just spent five minutes poking around and it's not obvious what this does, or why I would need it. The map populated with dots that did not seem to have function, and the state issues seemed a little off as most state legislatures are now out of sessions.

How does it compare to the free service GovTrack? What about paid services like CQ, BillTrack, and Politico?

You’re assuming that any of the voters actually read it. They don’t have time either. The real reason they voted the way they did is probably that somebody else told them to.

First of all 4us.com is completely free.

We've been working on this site for the last 2 years and have been funding this entirely from our pockets. If you have some free time on your hands please signup to check out some of the stuff you've been missing out.

The basic idea behind 4us is that you can:

- Browse all bills, voting records and members of Congress (kind of what GovTrack does)

- Get notified (email and site notification - facebook style) when there are changes to bills or members of Congress that you follow

- Discuss each bill in the discussion section

- Read simplified bills written by us or the users (that should be nonbiased)

- Join the discussion boards to discuss the latest events and news

- Vote on bills (similar to Countable)

- See how your votes align with what your Representative actually voted (for example if I vote on 10 bills and one of my Senators also voted on those 10 bills, then the site will build an approval rating based on those 10 votes compared. The approval rating or compatibility rating (as we also like to call it) will be on a scale from 0 - 100. The more our votes align the higher the approval rating. Which probably means I should vote for them again. The idea is that when we vote for our new Senators and Representatives we usually just vote based on what others think about them or what we hear in the media. This tool will tell you exactly how you should vote).

What we do is we compare your voting habits to your Congressional Representatives' (you can vote on bills the same way as your senator would) and educate yourself on the laws (we try to make the laws as simple as possible to the everyday citizen - by creating simple videos of the bills, finding and posting short summaries and by enabling discussion in the comment section) that affect us all.

It's the only site out there that will tell you how you actually align with your Reps based on how YOU and THEY feel about important bills. While this is still a long-shot to actually try and see some positive changes.. what we do want to do is help you BE BETTER INFORMED.

Thanks!

Interesting website with the potential to present a lot of information nicely, but I do not see the "simple" part of it. Everything about the UI and even the stat displays seems confusing to me. Why do I have a 0% compatibility rating with all of my local representatives, who I actually sort of like? I am sure I am misinterpreting these things, but there is no context. Mouse-over explanations for every single datum? Simple to me means about 1/3 as complicated as the site currently is.

Another problem is bill names tells us nothing about what is actually in the bill. How about sorting them based on who sponsored and voted for them? Then we can see highly partisan bills and bills that actually cross the aisle a little. That'd be interesting.

Anyway, I hope some of that is useful. Overall though it is a great "Show HN" site.

I can see the value in the organization of these activities. But without some kind of manual curation into "layman" categories or translations of what these activities are, it's still difficult for me to interpret.