Act On Principles is inspired by The Dallas Principles, which you may already be familiar with and is a call for full civil equality with ‘no delay and no excuses’. Act On Principles now gives us tools that put those principles into action. You can find it at: www.ActOnPrinciples.org

There is a video on the front page that does a great job explaining the site. Here are the basics of what AOP has to offer:

- Blog for Strategy
- Action Hub (searchable by State)
- Public Whip Count on LGBT legislation in Congress (this will change how Washington works!)
- Widgets for websites with up to date Whip Counts (it would be awesome on your site!)
- iPhone compatability (work for equality on the go!)
- Built in social networking and news aggregator functionality (share what you are doing to multiply its effect)
- A daily digest email summarizing activity over the previous day

The AOP site is a resource for our movement and it will only be successful in furthering the Dallas Principles with large scale participation. Please go there, register, sign up for the daily digest email, and use the tools as much as you can. We are often told to do something to help achieve equality, but rarely given a specific thing to do. AOP provides the missing guidance and allows you to do something about it while sitting at your computer. You can do something every day or once a week. You determine your level of commitment.

Govtrac is also a really great tool to help you track your congressional district and key legislation. It will even allow you to set your preferences to receive updates.

Bring your participation in government to Facebook with two new Facebook apps, RepresentedBy and Laws I Like. These apps, written by some other civic hackers, are based (in part) on congressional data shared by GovTrack.

RepresentedBy, by Will Turnage, lets you post to your profile a box with who represents you in Congress, shows the latest bills and news related to them. You can also challenge your friends to see if they know their Members of Congress, and it has an interesting metric of how digitally-transparent your Members of Congress are. The app was an honorable mention in Sunlight’s Apps for America Contest (1).

Laws I Like, by Chris Poliquin, lets you search for bills, vote on them, and then post your votes to your profile to tell your friends what they should get their Members of Congress to support or oppose. You can also see what bills your friends have voted on.

These are listed now on the revised Tools page on GovTrack.

OpenCongress also has a Facebook app which is similar to the above two (and OpenCongress is also based on GovTrack data).

Click to go to the Hate Crimes Law.

Click to go to the ENDA Law.

Click to go to the UAFA Law.