Open Congress

Joe Wallin and Eric Koester have been blogging recently about ways we in the start up community might impact public policy debates at the federal level.

Eric's written recently about his work on the startup visa issue, an important initiative that has been blogged about a lot in the tech industry and seems now to be getting attention in general mass market media as well (e.g., this article from Saturday's New York Times). Joe's been consistently on top of the absurdity of new 1099 reporting burdens imposed on small business by the health insurance reform legislation; and more recently, Joe's been honing in on his growing conviction that the thresholds for meeting the accredited investor definition should be lowered, notwithstanding the work he and I did together to get to the thresholds now in place. 

As Eric points out in his recent public policy post, one place to start when becoming involved is to be informed about legislative proposals already in play. 

A great resource to know about is the Open Congress site. It's relatively new, but it's consistent, and it's getting better all the time. If you don't already know this site, you might have a brief look at this post from yesterday. An interesting bit of information I just picked up from this post is that the House back in April passed a bill that would exempt businesses from an annual privacy policy notification requirement if they've made no changes to their prior privacy policies. As uncontroversial as this bill is, it's in limbo, Open Congress reports, as the Senate has so far failed to act on it. 

I've also just noticed that the Open Congress site is indexing who is blogging about a given bill. 

Another good resource is Joe's tweetstream. Joe is all over anything to do with taxes or government regulation of business.