Crowdsourcing Unemployment Benefits at OpenCongress.org

A few weeks ago I wrote about the wonderful work a community of OpenCongress users is doing to research information about pending unemployment legislation. These users had banded together in the comment threads for these bills, and were organizing calls to Senators and Representatives while offering support to one another. This community formed in 2008, when an unemployment benefits extension was last before Congress. After (successfully) calling on lawmakers to approve that extension, they then set out to determine how each of the individual states would implement the 13-weeks of benefits payments approved by Congress. Unfortunately, the number of Americans joining the ranks of the unemployed is still growing. With the prospect of another round of Emergency Unemployment Compensation in the congressional pipeline, it's becoming more and more difficult for these individuals to determine just which benefits they're qualified to receive. BenefitWiki.orgWe're trying to make that easier with the new Benefit Wiki project here on OpenCongress.
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