How might we better inform voters and build civic participation before, during and after elections?

Democracy, elections and voting at Democracy Chronicles

From Moneyball for Politics:

We’ve been working on a project that helps people understand Money in Politics and the relationships between all of the various donors and vendors. We’re looking to be considered for the Knight Foundation News Challenge.
If you like what we’re doing, please sign in and applaud the project for consideration.

While campaign finance portals do exist, and while downloads of this data exist, journalists, researchers, and the interested public alike are left to sort through a dizzying array of complicated spreadsheets in order to analyze and grasp the scope and meaning of these records. Given the rate at which money enters politics, this problem scales very poorly.

So we have built a pipeline to this public data, and we load it into a research data model which allows us to solve problems inherent to the data, and then we perform analysis and produce visual/interactive output using population-wide statistics, key relationships, and maps. We’re doing Politicians as baseball cards on the web.

Every individual and location in these records is referred to numerous lexical ways (eg. Jon or Jonathan; Street or St.) as supplied by all the individual filers, making counter-party identification difficult. We are developing research tools that are portable and scalable to these problems. The media, politicians, political vendors, and the interested public would all benefit from the clearer transmission of political speech data.

Right now, we are NY-focused. A successful outcome would involve adding every major municipal political data-set, as well as demographic data in 2015. This would enable us to have a tremendous impact on how appreciations of data themselves relate to politics in the widest possible field.