Dear Internet: It's no Longer OK Not to Know How Congress Works

This is exactly, EXACTLY why lobbyists must be banned.

It's not education, it's propaganda.

The country is run by people whose knowledge is solely based on propaganda?

As far as your bullet points, we already do much of that (ok, not in "real time", not with commit messages (you could have it, but everyone would quickly fill it in with "cause it's good for America"), but much of this is publicly available). Anyone who adds or votes for or against is very well documented. For my state it is a real PITA to parse out and apply but that information is provided and in a usable manner. The only thing missing is the speed and pretty ui.

Also, Sunlight has already done a great deal of work in this area (when I last checked they were still working on the API).

*Since, I've let the idea lay dormant for months now, I'll share it. The original idea was to setup a Facebook type "game" where bored housewives or whoever get a list of 5 random bills. They get the summary and it links to the bill's text and any current laws that will be affected by that bill. What they don't see is the bill's name and who the sponsor and co-sponsors are. After reading the summary they fill out a short survey of who and what party they think the bill came from, do they think the bill is a good or bad idea and any tags they think are appropriate for the law ("pork","insurance","nice", etc) and even add their own notes. After they do that they find out who the sponsor/co-sponsors are.

The idea was to give people an incentive to read pending legislation without an instinctive bias.

Though my code is ugly, I may GitHub what I have so far.

Before my startup days I spent years working for the local government, and before that for a large (formerly public) gas pipelining company. I've seen so many horrendous Access/VBA-based frontends, or worse, Excel spreadsheets with macros that this system doesn't seem so bad.

In a way I'm actually surprised that Congress even has system to collate all the emails, letters, phone calls and visits into one single database. That sounds really useful, and I'd love to hear from someone that has actually used it.

"this world of We've Always Done It This Way and You'll Need The Proper Authorization For That."

I don't think this is the product of "We've Always Done It This Way", it's the result of "We Have A Strict Budget For This And User Interface Is Difficult To Quantify". As for "You'll Need The Proper Authorization For That.", well, that's the stuff of government. I agree that it's overly restrictive, but I wouldn't want to see the government tip too far in the opposite direction.

I'd be all for donning a Guy Fawkes mask and changing the world if there was even the slightest assurance that the system replacing it would be better. I don't think there is.