How it works

The arcane details of what goes on in the U.S. Senate are recorded on a daily basis by GovTrack, then put into a machine-readable format so it can be consumed by others.

Every night, Filibusted checks to see what the Senate voted on that day. If there were any cloture votes, it finds out all it can about them — any associated bills and amendments, who voted which way, and so on — and stores it.

Sunlight Labs, the geek-friendly project of the Sunlight Foundation, assisted with basic information and photos for each senator.

Colophon

Filibusted is built atop Ruby on Rails, which makes it possible to cobble together cool things to meet deadlines.

It’s hosted by Slicehost — cheap, fast, developer-friendly VPS hosting.

Author

Filibusted was written by Andrew Dupont. Valuable feedback and advice was given by Justin Palmer.

Help out

Filibusted is an open-source, MIT-licensed project. If you’re keen on that sort of thing, you can browse the source code on GitHub and suggest changes.