Maplight technology, data, webtools

NPDEV Maplight Session Notes

• Maplight tracks the influence of money in politics.
• Takes public campaign finance data and analyzes/presents how it influnces politics.

• KY Senate race - $12 million each side spent in 2014, more money was spent than ever,but # of donors decreased

• Where maplight data comes from: FEC, state-level data, local-level data
• Difficulties: integration of multiple data sources & cleaning up messy data

• Where does data come from:
  • FEC.gov - massive flatfile downloads that need a *lot* of cleanup/processing/deduplication
  • Challenge is to match up the data to present an accurate view, and at the same time find examples of funny business
  • Another challenge is figuring out who donated to who - that data is messy
  • Name mispellings, company relationships, pac details
  • Problems with relying on external data sources that may go down, format may change, etc.
  • Have developed an internal crowd-sourcing tool to deal with these issues

• FEC standardizer tool

Presentation:

• Direct communication with journalists, etc.
• Website tools
• Legislation: - maplight.org
• Supporters/opposers list, contributions, map, timeline

• Voter Information: - votersedge.org
• Presents voter guides augmented with contribution info
• Embeddable widgets

• Dealing with the traffic for votersedge was very hard - the maplightfolks did an unfathomable amount of work to put together a spectacular tool!