Influence TX (State legislative campaign finance)

[mscarey]

What problem are we trying to solve?

Informing the Texas electorate about the effect of money on the legislative process.

Who has the time to search for hours and hours through newspapers and online articles in the (possibly vain) hope of finding unbiased information on each and every candidate?

By putting these campaign finance records and voting records together in a succinct mobile platform, we can turn uninformed voters into informed voters.

Who will benefit (directly and indirectly) from this project?

Concerned voters and journalists.

Where can we find any research/data available/articles?

Our project repository, including the data folder.

What help is needed at this time?

Data analysis, Django, front end.

What are the next steps (validation, research, coding, design)?

We still need more data analysis to create new informative content for users. Development of the website is going on and still needs work.

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[werdnanoslen]

Hi y'all, this project has been super active at our hack nights and I'm super thrilled. Could you post what you're working on right now? It'd definitely help with attracting other folks that don't come to hack nights (at all or as often).

[werdnanoslen]

@2echoi check out this project! You can meet us next weekend to learn more about what UX needs this team has https://www.meetup.com/Open-Austin/events/243579932/

[twentysixmoons]

Work was done at the 10/7 civic hack Saturday:

• Notes from CHN on where the team left off
• Issue Milestones

[lazarus1331]

Meetup on 11/3/17:

• Created KanBan board: https://waffle.io/open-austin/influence-texas
• Updated and Closed Milestone for Mozfest
• Planned for future work.

What we Need:

• We need mobile application developers to start on the frontend to consume the API @tonysyu built

[lazarus1331]

Meetup on 1/6/18:

• Merged code for improvements to web view
• Imported data into the integration live server

What we need:

• We need mobile developers to wrap the django application for delivery to different platforms.

[jplaut]

Hey all,

Not sure if this project is still active given the date of the last comment, but wanted to chime in. I'm working on a project now that correlates federal representatives' votes on bills with voters' own opinions on those bills in order to show voters their alignment with their representatives. The goal is to help voters make informed voting decisions and possibly inspire political action. I've been thinking about adding a concept of campaign contributions as well, which lines up well with what you're working on. I have an account with Open Secrets and have access to their API, which includes info on campaign contributions per rep by industry and company/entity. Would be great to find some cool ways to visualize that data (I'm a huge mapping/geo data nerd) and/or integrate it into the existing project I'm working on (https://vote.foundation). I'll be at the hack day tomorrow so hope to meet some of you there. Let me know if you think this idea fits at all with what you were working on.

[mscarey]

still very active, in case anyone is wondering. Repo

[lazarus1331]

April 16, 2019 Community Action Night:

• Reviewed UI design updates from Virgil
• Worked on Tests 110
• Discussed setting up a Discourse forum with Open-Austin Leadership
• Onboarded new contributor @annaderengowski