At its heart, Cloakroom is a civic data app. Our goal has been to combine social networking with legislative data to promote bipartisan policy discussions and to help each other get work done. The latest Cloakroom iOS update introduces a stream of news, polls, legislative data, and live congressional video tailored to your professional interests. Think of Cloakroom: Live as a firehose of data carefully calibrated by you and filtered by the Cloakroom community to deliver important and relevant information straight to your phone.
Like Cloakroom's main feed, Cloakroom: Live is a stream of "Hot" and "New" posts. Unlike Cloakroom's main feed, these posts come from curated channels like "Roll Call" or the "Council on Foreign Relations". We offer channels for Clinton, Trump, and Johnson too. Some channels are populated from open civic data sources like the House Rules Committee XML or the Sunlight Foundation's Congress API. Users simply select their channels of choice, and our own API does the rest.
New datasources can be swapped in anytime whether upon user request or in response to the ever-changing political landscape. Whenever obtaining open civic data requires writing a new data scraper, like to find a committee's live stream, we will post that code to an open-sourced repository on GitHub. With GitHub users are free to report bugs and request new features and civic hackers are encouraged to contribute to the repository.
We hope users will discover Cloakroom: Live is the fastest way to get important news and civic data on Capitol Hill and that access to good data strengthens our community as a whole.