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konklone / congress-android

Congress for Android, an app for tracking Congress.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.sunlightlabs.android.congress
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State Legislative Bodies #73

Closed unum15 closed 14 years ago

unum15 commented 14 years ago

I would like to see a feature where I could look up similar information about my state representative and senator, not just federal.

konklone commented 14 years ago

Me too. Sunlight has another project (also on Github) called the Fifty States project: http://github.com/sunlightlabs/fiftystates

The goal there is to write 50 parsers for the states, to get at legislators and bills at the state level. So, this feature is going to really only be possible once Sunlight has a good dataset and a hosted service, which is part of the project's plan. The Fifty States Project is a high priority Sunlight project and so this will definitely happen.

I'm going to leave this ticket open for a little while so more people can see and comment on it.

afomi commented 14 years ago

Great work on this -

Ideally, I'd like to see all levels of government. And my primary interest is in county & city levels. My overall sense of using this app is that there is lots of information. It seems that Issues become an alternative focus (but maybe that's another app). To be more clear, it might be effective to navigate by Issue.

In terms of more local data--- I found a .pdf from Cal's website (ca.gov) with the information about Elected Positions and City Officials; down to the city level, and it needs parsing. An alternative approach to get the info may be to crowd-source local government information (city and county officials) or approach it by Voting records.

When I put on my user/citizen's cap, I think of: Social participation, feedback (moderated forums that have "an issue: pro/con"), search by "issue", and real-time "unofficial" voting.

konklone commented 14 years ago

Rather than one app encompassing federal, state, and local levels of government, I think the better thing, from both a development and user perspective, is to have separate apps. For example, you could fork the Congress codebase and do a California app that focuses on local issues and politicians.

For social interaction and voting and the like, that stuff requires a hosted web service - so I'm thinking about linking it up to OpenCongress, instead of duplicating all that work. But that's a ways down the road yet.