A platform for collecting and presenting information about politicians.
Over the last 12 years we've seen ever increasing use of voter data by political campaigns to microtarget voters and rally support. The vision for Politician Insight is to employ similar technologies to help voters identify the candidates who will best represent them.
The platform is initially focused on building easily distributable tools to gather and present information about candidates in current elections and sitting officials. The long term objective is to aggregate the data from a number of locales over time to understand how candidates campaign and change their positions in light of their activity in office.
On the Issues - A tool to allow users to quickly pick the candidates and issues they care about and compare them side by side.
We have big goals, and need help to accomplish them. We're looking for local political organizations, developers, behavioral and political psychologists, governments and NGOs to engage.
If you're using our tools for your local elections, please send us a link to your google docs with the politician data. The hardest part of establishing something that can be useful on a national level is aggregating the data itself. There is a document stored with each tool in the repository called datasources that we are maintaining, please update it with information about your data and submit a pull request.
We're a small team and can always use help. We can use help with development, identifying key data, and ways of analyzing data. Our development focuses on building lightweight client side tools using AngularJS. We would like to make our tools more usable and create both data entry and presentation tools around common spreadsheet formats. The spreadsheets are easy to work and modify as we experiment with what data to store and how to structure it.
We know some of the questions we want to answer. What questions do you think we should answer? How can we go about answering complex questions about things like sincerity and honesty? What data do we need? How much data is necessary to be statistically significant? What kind of citations and validation should we require for data? How can we engage more people in collecting data? What tools do people need to contribute data? What tools do people need to visualize data?
If you're not able to directly engage in the project and want to help, you can let people know about our work. A few extra hands or connections can go a long way towards building a movement.
We want to build a national platform. If we are going build something that is a civic resource available to the voting public for free that is sustainable we have to capitalize it. If you know of an organization we should contact or of a grant we should apply for, please let us know. If your organization's mission is aligned please reach out to us! We're looking for organizations willing to sponsor our project and hopefully a non-partisan organization willing to become the steward of the larger data pool.
politician-insight@spry-group.com
Attn: Politician Insight
c/o The Spry Group, LLC.
996 Hancock Street
Brooklyn, NY 11221
+001 (718) 355-9767