Difference between revisions of "Who Represents Me"

Revision as of 16:01, 12 November 2009

Back to Participation 3.0

Local Who Represents Me? - Who Won - The problem - most national "who represents me" look-ups stop at the state legislative level and all of them only list directory information on how to engage in private communication with those officials versus opportunities for public engagement.

As resources allow, this will be a future "local everywhere" effort that first focuses on Minneapolis (deeply) and Minnesota (only 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 about who won (results) and the term of service.

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).

We also seek to work with the Voting Information Project to encourage more state and local election offices to participate in that crucial 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.