Domain51

Lawrence, Kansas, March 1st 2010–This past Friday Domain51, LLC and Kansas Grassroots Consulting, LLC jointly released a new iPhone application, Statehouse (iTunes Preview), targeted at lobbyists and citizens interested in keeping up with the government happenings in Topeka.

The number of bills and committees involved in Kansas Legislature can be daunting to even the trained specialist. Making this information more readily accessible to those who need it is the goal of Statehouse.

"The [Kansas] Government has made all of the information available, but it's not accessible," says Travis Swicegood, owner of Domain51. "Trying to navigate kslegislature.org on an iPhone is brutal." Kansas Grassroots and Domain51 think that this app fills some of the accessibility gaps in that website.

The app provides quick links to the daily calendars, agendas, and status updates for both chambers of the legislature. Searchable contact information for all current Representatives and Senators is available for offline use. Users can also see the current journal, schedule, and view the rules online.

This is Domain51's first iPhone application and the second joint venture between Domain51 and Kansas Grassroots Consulting. Earlier this year, they collaborated on the successful "Voices" program used as part of the Clean Air Kansas campaign.

I just added the ability to get Atom support to the blog here at Domain51. Be sure to add the feed to your feed reader. Adding support was really simple; Tom Preston-Werner already had the heavy lifting done in his blog.

Also new this month is Chris Dickinson. Chris started two weeks ago. He keeps coming back every day so I don't think I've scared him off (yet). Chris has a very diverse background—his degree is in Asian studies, with brief stints in CS and graphic arts. I'm really glad to have him on board.

We've had a really productive few weeks and have some big launches planned for November. Be sure to subscribe to the feed to see the announcements when these new sites launch.

Welcome to the Domain51.com. I've revamped the site to bring it up-to-date with what we're working on. I've also migrated the site over to Jekyll (my fork), which I highly recommend for basic sites.

There's a lot more that I plan to add (including comments to these blog posts), but those aren't necessary to get this out the door. So this qualifies as the release-early, release-often. Watch for more changes.