Difference between revisions of "Who Represents Me"

Latest revision as of 16:03, 15 December 2010

Back to Participation 3.0

Local Who Represents Me? - Who Won

Update: See DemocracyMap - In collaboration with The Open Planning Group we are focusing our resources on exploring a national open data set on the government jurisdictions who serve/govern you first. Data on who represents you specifically would then flow from that initial resource. We will explore Minnesota-pilot options at the specifically "who represents me" level if resources allow later in 2010.

Get Involved

• Join the DemocracyMap Online Technical Working Group to get involved.
• Contribute to the project's working notes.

Older Background Text

The problem:

1. Major "Who represents me?" look-ups of elected officials stop at the state legislative level.
2. These website only share contact information that allow you to contact officials privately and NOT opportunities for public engagement with those officials among fellow constituents.

As resources allow, this will be a future "local everywhere" effort that focused on Minnesota (based on readily available data) that demonstrates how to enhance the "Who is on my ballot?" data we've used with MyBallot.Net since 2002 with data from elections results and the term of service of information.

We plan to combine that data with a mix of "crowd sourced" how to effectively participate guide information (particularly for special use in our diverse Issues Forum areas) and Google/social media searches. In short, we want to connect constituents with elected officials in online public spaces across the "Web 2.0" world (or simply put, help someone "friend" their city council member on Facebook).

Our goals is to demonstrate this idea and share our lessons with other non-profits (such as the League of Women Voters, Project Vote Smart, etc.) and commercial, media, and search sites providing elected official look-up services.

We also seek to work with the Voting Information Project to encourage more state and local election offices to participate in that crucial election information standardization and data sharing effort. We will work to include results/who won fields in their schema in order to lower the cost across the field for creating local and national locally inclusive elected official look-ups across the United States.

See also Who is my Government? at TOPP Labs for the current status of work in this direction.