How do you know who represents you in government? It’s not a difficult question, but finding the answer might be harder than you think. There are many levels of government from federal offices to local school boards and looking up each one could take a long time. That’s why we built the NODE Project, to take all of this information and putting it in one place so that you can easily find it. The NODE Project is a site which allows you to learn about the elected officials in your government and contribute to a database of these officials. The site is built for everyone to become more involved in the democratic process by increasing engagement with representatives. The site also allows political scientists to access a copy of the site’s data for research purposes. If you create an account with the NODE project you can also submit suggested updates or additions to the information on the site.
The search functionality returns all elected officials who are holding offices which you can vote for in upcoming elections based on your address. If you want to contribute a correction or add missing information you can do that from this search results page. Each office holder also has their own page where you can find contact information in order to be more involved in the governmental process. Suggesting an update can be done from this site as well if you want to correct or add a representative’s contact information, name, or title. The site is built so that you can easily help contribute to this collection of information to enable better representation and engagement for everyone.
We set out to create a site where people could learn who represents them in government and researchers could access crowdsourced information. This site is now running as the NODE project and we hope you will take the time to visit it and contribute to the project.
