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Politics

Beyond the Bite

Challenges: 

Beyond the Bite

Project URL: 
http://www.beyondthebite.org
Short Project Overview: 

Beyond the Bite provides "actionable intelligence" about what members of Congress are doing and saying in a manner that is palatable not just to the hardcore activists who use most watchdog sites already, but to the casual audience to which most of us belong.

Detailed Project Overview: 

Beyond the Bite provides "actionable intelligence" about what members of Congress are doing and saying in a manner that is palatable not just to the hardcore activists who use most watchdog sites already, but to the casual audience to which most of us belong.

What do I mean by "actionable intelligence?"  First, let's talk about intelligence.

One problem with political discourse today is that quotations are often taken out of context, to the extent that citizens often assume that particularly egregious quotes they hear must be spun by political operatives or just plain inaccurate. This phenomenon makes it difficult for citizens to hold their politicians accountable. Beyond the Bite solves this problem by providing a reliable repository of quotations and soundbites surrounded by evidence, context, and analysis.  This is the intelligence.

We make that intelligence "actionable" by mashing up this data with related actions that users can take.  Beyond the Bite works off a principle I like to call "locality of outrage."  In a nutshell, my theory is that citizens are more likely to take actions on issues when they are presented with an opportunity right at the time of becoming outraged by a facet of the issue.

This combination of actions and intelligence is a potent force in transforming idle, impotent anger at an issue into constructive action towards a solution.

Beyond the Bite puts soundbites in context and allows concerned citizens to take this information and act on it immediately by tweeting, initiating a phone call, or taking another type of action.

 

Also, the app is open source, licensed under the GNU Affero General Public License (http://www.fsf.org/licensing/licenses/agpl-3.0.html).  If you fork it, please do republish your changes to me, thanks!

What else have you done in this area?: 

I am a computer scientist with a great deal of experience in web applications and data analysis.  In addition, I worked in the Federal privacy sector for several years doing policy work, including the creation of privacy officer positions at agencies throughout the federal government.

Is there a video that helps describe your Project? If so, enter the embed code here: 
Organization supporting your Project, if any: 
The Uyiosa Corporation
Supporting Organization URL: 
http://uyiosa.com
City: 
Sharon
State/Region: 
PA
Country: 
United States
Does your Project have financial support?: 
No
Is the impact area of your Project global?: 
Yes

VoteRightNow

Project URL: 
http://www.voterightnow.org
What will change in the world because this Project happens?: 

VoteRightNow is about changing the way our democracy works, right now! It's simple but elegant, really. Viral voting will sweep the land as the voters refuse to wait out time consuming and overpriced campaigns. THE PEOPLE will instead opt to instantly elect a candidate with a basic online or mobile phone button/code that asks them to answer one easy question: "Who do you want to be elected...candidate X,Y, or Z?" When political office holders are not coming through, instant recall buttons can similarly allow any and all voters to virtually throw the bum out with another press of the button and the instant tallying of local, regional, national, or international results. The more people that participate on VoteRightNow, the more powerful and accurate a tool it becomes. And the more powerful it becomes, the less usefull long, drawn out election campaign cycles and expensive formal voting become. VoteRightNow saves everyone time and money, and helps to foster greater democratic participation in the process.

What information will people interact with to make this change?: 

People with interact with a smallish widget on any website or cell phone that asks them a voter-relevant question, like who do you want to be President of the United States: Hillary Clinton, Barak Obama, or John McCain?" Or it could say "Should local city mayor X stay in office?". All votes are instantly tallied and a current, up to date vote count is made visible on the screen overlayed with a map of all voter locations. Finally, The mashup will include a sidebar for advertising. That's how it gets paid for and is part of the business model for long term improvements and sustainability. And we need it to be sustainable so we can do things like translate the tool into multiple languages and ultimately host a site where global, up-to-the-minute voting becomes centralized and easily searchable.

What else have you done in this Cause Area?: 

Not nearly enough...but time's a wastin so let's not talk about me!

Is there a video that helps describe your Project? If so, enter the embed code here: 
Organization Supporting your project, if any: 
Would love some!!!
Does your Project have financial support?: 
No
What kind of help or resources do you need to turn your project idea into a completed mashup?: 

Any and all you can throw at us!!! Graphical designers, techies, product managers, marketers, and ESPECIALLY deep-pocketed pals who are committed to political reform.

List URLs that link to, or describe, your mashup data sources: 

Please help us spread the word...Daddy didn't leave me a URL or link trust fund! And Momma certainly didn't want me to have a hand-me-down mashup. I need a brand new shiny one!!!

Additional Project Idea Representative: 
Sign on comrades - we need you!!!
Project Designer: 
Hopefully a damn good one.
Project Engineer: 
Preferably a geek with attitude!

Ask Your Lawmaker: Connecting Local Communities to their Lawmakers

Project URL: 
http://www.askyourlawmaker.org
What will change in the world because this Project happens?: 

How many Americans can interview their U.S. Senator or Representative? With Capitol News Connection’s Ask Your Lawmaker website (www.askyourlawmaker.org) and customizable widgets anyone with an Internet connection can keep their lawmaker accountable. Pioneering a new social journalism, CNC is mashing up traditional shoe-leather reporting with social networking to empower users to ask questions of elected representatives, vote on other user’s questions, listen to audio of a lawmaker’s response, discuss and share the results. Ask Your Lawmaker (AYL) is utilizing the interactivity, customizability and viral nature of Web 2.0 to connect citizens to their Congressional lawmakers and shine a light of transparency on the political process. It is our experience that asking questions other media avoid can help change policy.

Teaming with news staff at local public radio stations and an active citizenry, CNC plans to extend the AYL service to cover state and municipal governments. This includes further customization of the AYL website and widgets so that they allow users to choose between national, state and municipal views, and enable local citizens to get and upload lawmaker or local candidate answers. CNC also intends to create a hyper-personal version that displays a citizen’s own questions and answers. Users can harness a Drupal-powered website, embeddable Flash widgets customizable by state and issue, Google maps and other APIs – in addition to CNC and its 200+ partner stations’ accredited access and editorial experience to create original news stories that build on user dialogue and lawmaker responses. User-created content will be featured on Ask Your Lawmaker, www.cncnews.org and myriad other blogs and sites, as well as broadcast on local public radio stations nationwide. Utilizing new widgets, AYL users will be able to share, discuss and promote the questions they asked of lawmakers as well as the content they created based on those answers on social networks like MySpace and Facebook, and via SMS on cell-phones.

The aim is to build user communities that exist on the local, regional and national level are linked to each other via social networking sites and Ask Your Lawmaker. By publishing and tracking individual and group questions for lawmakers, coupled with the ability to create and publish new content based on those responses, Ask Your Lawmaker is a living example of how local voices can truly set the news and legislative agendas.

What information will people interact with to make this change?: 

Ask Your Lawmaker draws its information from three primary sources: user-generated questions and comments; lawmaker responses to user questions; and CNC exclusive news reporting as informed by users of AYL widgets. Because widgets are customizable by state and issue, CNC reporters have a better understanding of local concerns and issues. The plan is to team with government transparency sites like Maplight.org and Open Congress, bloggers and issue-based sites and social networks such as Care2.com to provide AYL users with raw data necessary to inform questions and evaluate answers towards active and effective citizen engagement. We want to build APIs that link to supporting information from other sources, encourage collaboration and allow sites and blogs to build on the answers via partnerships with citizen journalists site such as Helium.com. where API would allow debate around lawmaker answers to continue and translate talk into action. We want AYL users to create and collaborate on news stories or follow-up on original CNC coverage by mashing up audio of lawmaker responses with supporting or contradictory data provided by partner sites, bloggers and public radio stations and first hand experience based on user comments.

What else have you done in this Cause Area?: 

Capitol News Connection’s mission is to ensure voters are engaged and lawmakers accountable towards an informed democracy. CNC is an innovative and independent nonprofit news service that brings politics ‘home’ to almost 2 million public radio listeners each day with exclusive investigative coverage focused on the local impacts of national decisions and interactive segments that connect citizens to lawmakers. CNC empowers voters to be more active and effective civic participants, raises the level of discourse, and shines the light of transparency on the political process. CNC gives citizens a voice in their future: It helps shape policy by asking the important questions other media avoid to bring to lawmakers’ attention problems, challenges and solutions. News reports, features and shows are heard in 200+ markets. It was first public media organization in 12 years to win the national Joan S. Barone Award for its exclusive reporting on the Abramoff, Cunningham, DeLay scandals.

Is there a video that helps describe your Project? If so, enter the embed code here: 
Project RSS Feed: 
http://feeds.feedburner.com/AnswerPodcast
Additional Project RSS Feed: 
http://feeds.feedburner.com/NewsItemPodcast
Does your Project have financial support?: 
No
What kind of help or resources do you need to turn your project idea into a completed mashup?: 

Funding from the Sunlight Foundation, Park Foundation and Corporation for Public Broadcasting got Ask Your Lawmaker this far with this first iteration of the site and widgets. Now the nonprofit CNC is looking for support to take this project to the next level. There are three main areas help and resources would be most beneficial: 1/ Funding for web development, outreach, and daily operational costs from hosting to support for the journalists getting questions answered in local communities; 2/ Advice, feedback and donated or reduced-rate coding and design help from Drupal and Flash developers; and 3/ partners to work with us on site-specific APIs.

EPA Superfund Mashup: Exposing Environmental Hazards In Your Area

What will change in the world because this Project happens?: 

A Superfund site is an uncontrolled or abandoned place where hazardous waste is located, possibly affecting local ecosystems or people. Sites are listed on the National Priorities List (NPL) upon completion of Hazard Ranking System (HRS) screening, public solicitation of comments about the proposed site, and after all comments have been addressed.

For many years, I lived in a very large Superfund site area without knowing and I'm sure many are in the same situation. This is because the EPA's pollution information is buried in the files on the web that are not easily human readable. Even the information provided by the EPA is only cursory, naming possible hazards and whether is has yet been deemed "clean."

Pollution CleanupThe "EPA Superfund Mashup: Exposing Environmental Hazards In Your Area" Project will make the 200+ Superfund Site's information visually available and human readable. It will promote engagement and accountability in private and public cleanup efforts and encourage those who live and work in those areas to document cleanup efforts and the human effect of large scale air, water, and soil pollution.

What information will people interact with to make this change?: 

Online, users with interact with photos, videos, public posts and detailed EPA data.

Offline, people will be encouraged to document cleanup (or lack of clean up) activities and human stories of how living in such an area effects their lives.

They can send tagged data to flickr, youtube, and post stories on blogs that will then be parsed to the correct Superfund site, making documentation collaborative, public and dynamic.

What else have you done in this Cause Area?: 

See StopNewNukes.org for an example of the first project. I worked with Peace Action West to create this mashup and action. It shows you all of the places in the U.S. that have been effected by nuclear waste already (including a flickr feed of photos from those places) and sends you off to send a letter to Theodore Wyka, the manager of the Complex 2030 project over at the Dept. of Energy telling him that you don't want anymore nuclear development funding.

THe EPA Superfund Mashup: Exposing Environmental Cleanup In Your Area will be V2 of this project. It will encompass all 200+ superfund sites, including evironmentally disastrous things like oil spills and corporate pollution (instead of just radioactive cleanup).

Is there a video that helps describe your Project? If so, enter the embed code here: 
Organization Supporting your project, if any: 
Peace Action West
Supporting Organization URL: 
http://www.peaceactionwest.org
Does your Project have financial support?: 
No
What kind of help or resources do you need to turn your project idea into a completed mashup?: 

We will need a mySQL and/or XML programmer to expand current input and dynamically integrate different types of data.

List URLs that link to, or describe, your mashup data sources: 

Sources include:

EPA Superfund Data

Flickr (by tags)

YouTube (by tags)

Relavent info from the MetaVid Project

Accountability information from CorpWatch

Project Designer: 
Gabriel Scelta
Project Designer NetSquared Member Name: 
sfgabe

MAPLight.org: Mapping Money and Politics

What will change in the world because this Project happens?: 

Politicians raise millions of dollars to fund their campaigns, and they often pay back campaign contributors with special access and favorable laws. While many people know this, they are do not know how much our money-dominated system affects them and the issues they care about.

Mapping Money and Politics is a “mashup“ showing campaign contributions on a map. It provides unprecedented transparency, providing an informative and appealing way to compare candidates and track special-interest giving.

Watch the video tour of Mapping Money and Politics

With this groundbreaking project, anyone can create, view, and share maps of contributions from the oil industry, labor unions, or any other interest influencing government. You can compare candidates, to see who has the most local support and whose financial support comes from out-of-state. You can even display income, ethnic, and other demographic information along with campaign contributions, to better understand what neighborhoods and populations have a greater or lesser stake in our democracy.

Mapping Money and Politics lets you zoom from a map of the whole U.S. down to your local neighborhood. We aim to illuminate the connection between special-interest campaign dollars and your own state, town, and neighborhood.

Looking at the country through the lens of campaign contributions helps you see the distorted terrain our legislators work in. It’s no wonder they can’t take straight action on the serious problems facing our country.

Mapping Money and Politics is a visual mash-up--it’s better to see it than read about it. Watch our 3-minute project tour now.

What information will people interact with to make this change?: 

You can choose from a range of current issues, legislators and interest groups. You can compare them at the national, state, or local level, across time or against each other.

You can interact with campaign contributions to the politicians who represent you in Congress and, eventually, in your state and for your town. Does your elected official represent your interests? Our maps showing bases of support--both in your area and outside of it--help answer that question.

What else have you done in this Cause Area?: 

MAPLight.org pioneered the combination of campaign dollars and politicians' votes when we launched our U.S. Congress site in May 2007. Our site, a large-scale mashup, reveals patterns of money and influence in unprecedented ways. For an overview, view our 6-minute Video Tour.

Our work has been featured by the New York Times, The Nation, Wired, and many others. We are the winners of the inaugural NetSquared Innovation Award and the prestigous U.N.-affiliated World Summit Award.

Is there a video that helps describe your Project? If so, enter the embed code here: 
Organization Supporting your project, if any: 
MAPLight.org - Money and Politics: Illuminating the Connection
Supporting Organization URL: 
http://www.maplight.org
Does your Project have financial support?: 
Yes
What kind of help or resources do you need to turn your project idea into a completed mashup?: 

We need:

  • Technical specialists in the current best practices of displaying geographic data on the web
  • Geographic information system (GIS) software
  • Academic researchers specializing in U.S. Census demographic data
  • Additional funding to complete and launch the project
List URLs that link to, or describe, your mashup data sources: 

Read about our data sources.

MAPLight.org also publishes widgets tracking funds raised by all candidates for President and U.S. Congress, plus an API that lets programmers include candidates' fundraising data on their own websites.

Ushahidi: Mapping Reports of Post-Election Violence in Kenya

Project URL: 
http://www.ushahidi.com
What will change in the world because this Project happens?: 

Ushahidi was initially set up to mainly document incidents of violence, looting etc. during the post-election crisis in Kenya. Over time the website began document peace efforts and ways to help.

The impetus behind the website was a belief that the number of deaths being reported by the government, police, and media is grossly underreported. We also were of the view that we don't have a true picture of what is really happened/is happening- reports that all have us have heard from family and friends in affected areas suggests that things are were worse than what we have heard in the media. Beyond trying to present are fuller picture of what happened based on citizen reported information, we also want to create an archive of events that occured after the election results were announced.

Once we are done with the mapping of incidents, we also hope that we can begin to put names and faces to the people who have lost their lives and create a memorial of sorts.

What’s the point of all this you might ask?

Well, Kenyans have demonstrated their capacity for selective amnesia time and time again. When this crisis comes to an end, we don’t want what happened to be swept under the rug in the name of “moving forward” - for us to truly move forward, the full story of what happened needs to be told - Ushahidiis our small way of contributing to that.

 

Ushahidi will change in the world in the following ways:

  1. There will be more awareness about incidents of violence of looting in post-election Kenya, these incidents may not have neccessarily been covered by mainstream media. There will also be a visual timeline of the events post Dec 27, allowing people to track points of escalation and cooling down.
  2. More information about efforts to promote peace by Kenyan citizens on the ground and information on how people can help.
  3. There will be a digital archive or "memorial" of sorts for the events that have happened in Kenya so that we can never forget.
  4. There will be a documentation of information that can be used in any future peace and reconciliation efforts.
  5. There will be an opportunity of the hitherto unnamed and unseen victims of the violence to tell their stories.
  6. There will be a model that can be replicated in other future crisis events.
What information will people interact with to make this change?: 

Ushahidi consists of citizen-provided data - reports of violence from the ground in Kenya via mobile phones (SMS), email and the website form. We geocode this data using the Google Maps API.

What we're looking to do is add additional functionality, including more specific points on the map of Kenya for each incident, meaning additional map overlays. We would also like to create a "heat map" that shows which areas are in deeper conflict at a specific time. Some thought has been given to marrying this idea up with the current timeline feature.

Lastly, we would like to add a seperate data point, "news". This presents a great opportunity to link news stories with citizen reported violence, YouTube videos and Flickr images to give a wholistic viewpoint on any one report.

Ideas surrounding how to handle duplication of content, better geocoding, map overlays and how to best integrate other APIs are greatly appreciated!

What else have you done in this Cause Area?: 

Ory Okolloh is the co-founder of www.mzalendo.com (a website that keeps an eye on the Kenyan Parliament). She is a graduate of Harvard Law School and is best known for her blog coverage of the Kenyan election and post-election fallout on KenyanPundit.com.

Erik Hersman is the founder of www.afrigadget.com, and WhiteAfrican.com, where he analyzes and talks about developments in the web and mobile space and how they affect Africa.

David Kobia is the founder of www.ihavenotribe.com, TextHQ and Mashada. With a background in web design and application development.

Is there a video that helps describe your Project? If so, enter the embed code here: 
Project RSS Feed: 
http://blog.ushahidi.com/index.php/feed/
Organization Supporting your project, if any: 
None at the moment
Does your Project have financial support?: 
No
What kind of help or resources do you need to turn your project idea into a completed mashup?: 

Ushahidi was whipped together over a 2-day period at the beginning of January. It was of the utmost importance that the website get up quickly so that it could be used immediately. However, in doing so, we took some development shortcuts.

In short, Ushahidi has to be re-written. It's currently in ASP, and we would like to convert it over to PhP for scalability and openness. Our goal would be to have a replicable solution for other violence related crisis situations, open enough for other developers to contribute.

Ideas surrounding how to handle duplication of content, better geocoding, map overlays and how to best integrate other APIs are greatly appreciated!

List URLs that link to, or describe, your mashup data sources: 

http://maps.google.com (map solution)

http://www.ushahidi.com (citizen-provided crisis data)

Additional Project Idea Representative: 
Ory Okolloh
Project Designer: 
Erik Hersman
Project Designer NetSquared Member Name: 
ehersman
Project Engineer: 
David Kobia
Project Engineer NetSquared Member Name: 
dkobia

ARMSFLOW.org

Project URL: 
http://www.ARMSFLOW.org
What will change in the world because this Project happens?: 

ARMSFLOW is a data visualization which displays arms transactions globally between 1950 and 2006. ARMSFLOW provides a context for historical and contemporary geopolitical events by allowing visitors to see the international flow of weaponry, sorted by year, country, and direction of sale.

What information will people interact with to make this change?: 

ARMSFLOW includes 14,619 arms transactions (each is a sum of 1 year's exports) and 228 government entities. The governments of origin and destination are geocoded using Yahoo's Geocoding API. The data was used with permission from the SIPRI Arms Transfers Database in Stockholm.

What else have you done in this Cause Area?: 

http://www.vestaldesign.com/design/shrimp-refugee-housing/ The SHRIMP (Sustainable Housing for Refugees via Mass Production) is an attempt to bring housing and other relief to large displaced or homeless populations, especially those who have suffered in a natural disaster. It has been featured in Wired, CNET, and was recently selected for the Milan Triennale's "Una casa per tutti" exhibit in May 2008.

Is there a video that helps describe your Project? If so, enter the embed code here: 
Organization Supporting your project, if any: 
Vestal Design
Supporting Organization URL: 
http://www.vestaldesign.com
Does your Project have financial support?: 
No
What kind of help or resources do you need to turn your project idea into a completed mashup?: 

ARMSFLOW is part of a larger project called FLOWBASE which is intended to provide users with tools to visualize flows, using enormous or inaccessible data sets. Future targets include crime databases, the CIA World Factbook, and Scorecard.org.

With additional resources, FLOWBASE will allow users to participate in the review, parsing, and interpretation of data sets. Note that the users do not *generate* the data – rather, they collaborate in its interpretation, and they correlate it across sets. They work together to attach significance to these flows.

For this reason, ARMSFLOW attempts to display information sans agenda – leaving it to the visitors to draw conclusions from the information in a participatory structure.

List URLs that link to, or describe, your mashup data sources: 

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