Congress is entering the 21st century in a small but meaningful — let’s call it handheld sized way — with two new iPad apps designed specifically for the legislative body, released this week.
MarkUp is a new iPad app designed by the advocacy-aggregator startup company POPVOX, which bills the $9.99 product as “the first app designed specifically for Congressional staff & Members.”
The app is designed to be a dashboard and annotation cool for all legislation documents, which generally run into the hundreds of pages. The app contains all bills in the 112th Congress as well as the positions of not only legislators, but advocacy groups and constituents, even at the granular, constituent-level.
“The [POPVOX] founding team began discussing it as soon as we heard about the House Rules change in January that would allow Members to have mobile devices on the House Floor,” said Marci Harris, CEO of POPVOX, in an email to TPM.
Indeed, in January the House Committee on Rules, which establishes original jurisdiction, or the rules that govern the interactions on the House Floor, changed the old rules from “A person may not smoke or use a wireless telephone or personal computer on the floor of the House” to “A person on the floor of the House may not smoke or use a mobile electronic device that impairs decorum,” expressly to allow House members and staffers to be able to use their cell phones and tablets.
As early as May of 2010, the month after the iPad debuted, Congress members were gushing over the device and its potential for minimizing the voluminous paper volumes of bills and other documents that people on Capitol Hill are frequently seen carrying around, Politico reported.
That’s precisely what lead POPVOX to concentrate on iPad development first, with the company noting that the iPad was getting the most adoption among staffers and Congress members in its informal surveys. Harris said the company would consider developing an Android version based on “the response and the adoption of those devices on the Hill.”
“We pride ourselves on our neutrality, political, platform, and otherwise,” Harris said.
As for the price point, Harris told TPM that the company is mainly looking to reimburse its investors, a group of crowdsourced fundraisers.
“We’re not looking to this as a revenue source, but a way to get the constituent input in the hands of Members and to give Members and staff tools they need to do their jobs more efficiently,” Harris said.
Meanwhile, House Majority Whip Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) on Thursday launched his own app (developed by High Ground Solutions), Whipcast, designed to do some of the same things, including keep track of legislation as it moves through the House, and receive press releases and voting alerts.
It doesn’t pull in constituent or advocacy group positions like POPVOX, but it is the “first government app to be launched simultaneously across all major platforms – iPad, iPhone, Blackberry and Android,” according to McCarthy.
Still, Rep. McCarthy couldn’t help but use the announcement of his app as a political attack against Democrats. As he put it in his press release.
“While in the Minority, we saw how the Democrat Majority obscured their actions from the public as they wrote legislation behind closed doors and limited floor debate, and we vowed to chart a new course. WhipCast allows anyone who downloads the app to have the full text of legislation before it is considered on the House floor…”
And we couldn’t help but notice that McCarthy’s contrived take on the Apple “there’s an app for that,” commercials also included a mention of the country’s jobless rate climbing, which hasn’t been the case for some time. Watch here:
