It's hard to drag us out of Washington, but here we are at Cisco Systems in San Jose, CA -- demonstrating Ask Your Lawmaker, and the exciting plans we have to improve this site and its widgets with enhanced customization options and social networking functionality.

We are one of 21 finalists in Tech Soup's third annual Netsquared Mashup Challenge Conference along with some great projects like www.Maplight.org, www.Metavid.org and www.OpenCongress.org - and today the leading lights of web 2.0 vote for the best. Competition is tough - and we are being judged on our chances of success and making the greatest impact. Winners get some cash and development support from the best of Drupal and open source coders and designers.

You can read the live blog about all the two minute 'elevator pitches' for the 21 featured projects video blog.

Specifically, here are some of the ways we are hoping to work with the Netsquared community to improve AYL:

• tools to allow users to "truth squad" lawmaker answers and collaborate to create new content and follow up questions
• APIs to inform user questions
• and the means by which users can upload audio and video answers gathered when lawmakers are back home in their districts.

We also want to improve and enhance widget customization and functionality, with more features on the widget. We want to create personalized widgets "My Questions, My Answers", as well as widgets customized around questions and answers for specific lawmakers, and for use in State Capitols and Town Halls.

So for those of you who want to see Ask Your Lawmaker reach its full potential - keep your fingers crossed. Bad stuff happens in Congress when no one is watching, and we think Ask Your Lawmaker can have a positive impact on our democracy.

Here is the live blog of our project presentation.