As always, we don’t update this blog enough. Perhaps we should switch to a twitter account? We’re back from Thanksgiving (not that we actually left at all).
Anyway, we’re busily putting finishing touches on the last parts of what we’ll call the Presidential Primaries Game we’re developing in partnership with a media partner. We’re still bootstrapping (a fancy entrepreneurial way of saying that we’re still living like we did in college) and trying to make government more transparent, engaging, and as exciting as sports.
We’re excited about the CNN-YouTube Debates (running tonight for the Republicans) because some of our friends in the weird world of online politics will be participating. We’re all looking forward to this cool primary game and hopefully it will be sufficiently fun for the people who do play.
So, we’re working on a number of cool things. In terms of FC, we’re responding to user comments and focusing on providing a better gameplay experience and making sure that Fantasy Congress is understandable for both our educational users and our fabulous political users. On the list is changing the trading system, improving our messaging system, and making our coverage more comprehensive (yes, RSS feeds for the Top 10, hopefully). We always believed that you can learn about what’s going on in Congress and also have fun. Hopefully, we’re accomplishing that.
Wait though, true believers (a comic-book reference for all of you fans of Marvel Comics, including Senator Patrick Leahy), but we’re working on a sweet election game. Hopefully it will as cool as I dream it to be (it also doubles as an espresso machine… that feature may not occur until version 2). We’re working with a great media partner who we will announce our election game with, but stay tuned for more updates!
On a separate note, we want to give every league the power to extend their season. Arjun and I earlier this year guessed based on the House and Senate target adjournment dates that the Congress would be adjourned by this Friday, but it seems that… yeah, they’re gonna keep on going. More playing of the politics! Send us an e-mail at support@fantasycongress.com and let us know what you think.
One of the teachers using Fantasy Congress in Georgia asked us a great initial question, “Who are you guys? I know you just graduated, but are you working on this full-time?”
Well, if our About Us page didn’t scare you off, and you’re still interested, then let us explain why we’re working more on Fantasy Congress. Start with our history section in Fantasy Congress, with more after the jump.
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So Ryan, Ian, Andrew and I just pulled another all-nighter so we could deploy the new version of our site. Its been a while since we added any major features and we are excited to see what you think about them.
I’m excited about the addition of votes (Ryan did an awesome job on the bar graphs) and curious to see how our new Reported Bills Average (RBA) works out. It is essentially the percent of legislation with the force of law (no resolutions, ie H.RES or S.RES) that has come out of committee. It was quite shocking to see how low most of the RBAs are, which really goes to show how difficult it is to get bills out of committee.
There are a lot more features coming up, especially in the area of community, so keep checking back.
Please comment about your thoughts on the updated site using the comments section of this post.
