The National Open Data Elections (NODE) project is an informational web application that enables people to discover U.S. representatives via an address searchable database.
While you are probably aware of prominent offices like congress and the presidency, are you also able to name the local offices you vote for on the county or school district level? Getting information about these offices is often difficult and many go uncontested, presenting an informational barrier to civic engagement. Visitors to our site can easily search for this information by providing their address.
There are many existing systems that allow one to search for their federal, state, county and local representatives and find pertinent information about them. However, a big problem in Civic Tech is that there is no consolidated, easily digestible application that allows users to view representatives of every level. The existing applications are typically only useful for finding information about a specific group, such as high level officials like senators, and they fail to provide people with an intuitive way to discover who represents certain areas (e.g., state legislative districts). An example of this system would be our own government portal - a government sponsored search application that allows users to find their elected representatives. This application, however, suffers from major technical flaws in terms of user digestion and sustainability of the overall system.
If one were to try browsing through an elected official application to find a lower level position such as a school board seat for a specific district, they may find that they have to traverse several webpages to get to the desired information. The point of this example is to show that it is difficult to learn about county and local level officials, much less find information about how to contact them. If you wanted to find this type of information, you would often have to pay someone like our project partner, Jim Cupples. Thus, illustrating the overarching challenge that has plagued most areas of civic tech: creating sustainable business models and informational streams for public use. Specific information about lesser known areas is either expensive, unreliable or difficult to find.
The NODE project intends to obliterate the current for-profit business model surrounding political data and enable users to have access to consolidated, accurate information about their public officials for free. NODE aims to do this by, eventually, relying on crowd-sourcing. The NODE team believes that this application will empower people to get informed and involved in politics – specifically local-level offices in which most races for elected positions go uncontested.
To learn more about the project, the team, and our project partner, Jim Cupples, please visit our website using the link listed below.
