Congressional Comprehension

Inspiration

The rate at which politics is being shared and discussed in the age of information has encouraged US citizens to become more engaged. However, the law's complexity and density creates a barrier between those who are unfamiliar with legal processes, too busy, or both. This lack of engagement expands the disconnect between politicians and their constituencies.

What it does

Congressional Comprehension seeks to bridge this gap by providing summaries of the most recent votes by state senator and congressional district. After users enter their address to confirm their congressional district (don't worry, the data is inaccessible after the program ends) they will be presented with the 15 most recent bills from their senators and representative, how the congressperson voted, and how his or her chamber voted. Clicking on the result brings up a pop-up window with the title of the bill and a summary.

How we built it

We used Python, especially referring to the tkinter and response libraries. ProPublica and Geocodio's API were used to access information about districts, congresspeople, and their votes.

Challenges we ran into

Multiple APIs seemed to provide a quick solution to figuring out where congressional districts were drawn, but were either depreciated or were not as detailed as we thought. We were all familiar with Python, but not languages that could have simplified in the interface process (e.g. HTML, CSS).

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Most of the team were data scientists, but were able to pick up on APIs, tkinter, and more aspects of user-interface heavy software in a matter of hours!

What we learned

Government is willing to provide information about its activities, but searching for it is the hardest part.

What's next for Congressional Comprehension

Add ability to share bills and laws on social media, connect with congresspeople through the app, polish user interface, connect a name to a face (image of congresspersons), and transfer to web and mobile applications if time allows.

Built With

• geocodio
• propublica
• python
• tkinter