Sunlight Labs is having three "Hack-a-Thons" coming up. One at Transparency Camp, one at PyCon, and Web2.0 expo. Heck, a few of us are going to SxSW this year and we may do one there, too. Please vote on these ideas and let us know what you think we should be working on at these hack-a-thons. A note: we're naturally averse to advocacy type ideas. We'll likely not do them. It isn't that we don't believe in democracy though! It is because we're a c3 organization, and are legally prohibited in certain ways from doing very much in the form of advocacy.
A prototype spreadsheet-type tool that allows a user to check-off any row based data about a particular district and its member. Fields could include: Name, Census information about the district like Poverty Rate, etc, committees a member is a part of, caucuses that a member is a part of, maybe the top words of a member (from the capitol words API), top industries that have given to the member (from the OpenSecrets API), and a roll call vote. The user should be able to then sort a table that is a result of this query. Just a simple sortable dhtml table. The end result is being able to get a table of SB 227, and then to say "which members of the banking committee that are in high-poverty districts voted for the bankruptcy bill" by sorting the table. Or "which members voted for TARP had 'Finance and Banking' as their top industries."
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This makes me think of a Freebase-style system where fairly arbitrary associations can be setup between entities (like government officials) and all these facts. I wonder if this could be built directly on Freebase?