“Want to know when the president signs a bill into law? When congress votes on a bill? When a new legislator is representing you? Since 2014, The Sunlight Foundation has been connecting its massive trove of government data to IFTTT, the popular web service that connects things on the internet to other things…For those unfamiliar with IFTTT, it works like this: Users create recipes that consist of a trigger (the “IF” portion of IFTTT), such as “If I get a Facebook notification,” and a result, such as “send me an email.” The idea is to connect up the myriad services and information available on the internet to make them work in concert with one another. The function of the service is spelled out in its name, which doubles as an initialism: IF This, Than That. The Sunlight Foundation has put IFTTT to work by bridging its Congress API to various online services. The foundation automatically pulls in lots of data from the government — the locations and zip codes of congress members, for example, and the crush of information that accompanies the legislature’s routines: floor votes, hearings, bills, amendments and nominations. With IFTTT, The Sunlight Foundation allows people to automatically get an email when the president signs a bill into law, or save that law to a read-later app like Pocket or Instapaper…”