Yesterday, the FEC posted a 46 page PDF file to its website asking for comments on its website. We’ve taken the entire PDF and put it up online for easy perusal. You can email the comments in to improvefecinternet@fec.gov, or send them in to the FEC. But to make it really easy, we’re launching our FEC Brainstorm today to solicit comments to submit to the FEC. We’ll take the best comments that are submitted and include them in our testimony, with attribution (provided you leave your identity in the idea you submit) of course. Comments are due to the FEC by July 21st, but we’ll close our open feedback app for new ideas by July 16th so we have time to compile them with our testimony.
Instead of continuing to invest in FECFile, a windows based application, develop web services for 3rd party vendors and committees to certify and post filings to. This will allow many different applications and platforms to submit electronic filings to the FEC and save the FEC money (e.g. you won't have to build a mac or a linux client)
According to the organization chart here: http://www.fec.gov/pages/orgchart.htm the FEC doesn't have anyone in charge of new media. The FEC should have someone that gets online communication and technology to run the website, rather than having the website run by a technology team or a traditional communications team. This should be a senior staff position, reporting directly to the Deputy Staff Director for Management, and NOT the Director of IT/CIO/CTO.
Searches for Lastname, Firstname work, but not searches for Firstname Lastname. In a particular candidate's listing of contributions, the contributor's name is hyperlinked to see all that contributor's contributions. But the entire name and address is linked; if any contributions were listed under a variant name or slightly different address, these do not appear.
Allow committees to opt-in to real-time disclosure and report their campaign contributions via web-service in real time rather than quarterly.
The Vendor Tools package is a great resource but once a version is released we lose access to the previous versions. The change log attached to the file format specification is not enough, researchers need official archived copies of the VendTools.zip tied to a FEC format revision. Otherwise we may lose out on detailed transaction information on early data (v3.00/2001) and filings submitted between versions (5.1/5.2/5.3).
Allow early filing by committees, embargoed until report is due, so that there is not a rush to submit at the last moment.
Content that could have RSS feeds: 1. New Committees 2. New Candidates 3. New Campaign Finance Filings
Ensure that transactions that incorrectly get filed twice don't get loaded twice. Prevent the problem of incorrect duplicates before it happens
The query interface for candidates and committee filings is nicely done and usable, but there is no way to export data directly from search results. An interface like the American Fact Finder for CENSUS data or Database Explorer on BLS.gov would be fantastic, but even a much simpler interface allowing the export of multi-committee searches would be priceless for researchers.