Weyes

See how the money flows in Washington D.C.

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Inspiration

Congressional stock trading is a cornerstone issue in Congress today, with bills being setup as bipartisan issues. Traditional disclosure documents are dense, hard to navigate for casual readers, and incredibly hard to visualize holistically. We decided to create a visual analysis tools which took this dense, messy, and unfriendly data to transform it into a user-friendly graph displaying the flow of money in Congress. This makes it incredibly easy for researchers, journalists, and citizens to follow the money.

What it does

  • Our platform visualizes the intricate relationships between:
    • Corporations and their stock holdings
    • Politicians and their financial interests
  • Users can search for any entity (company, politician, organization) and instantly see:
    • A force-directed network graph showing all connections
    • Real-time node selection with detailed relationship breakdowns

How we built it

Frontend:

  • React was used for an awesome UI/UX experience
  • D3.js for graph visualization

Backend Architecture:

  • Python and FastAPI for the backend integration and data scraping
  • PostgreSQL to host the database
  • Railway for deployment

Challenges we ran into

  • Ideation and brainstorm took almost a full day as we were struggling to find a project that could have real-world impact or was truly engaging with us.
  • Deployment took quite a while because of a lack of documentation as well as a lack of available build tools.
  • Scraping the data was a bottleneck for us as we had multiple sources to comb through and were significantly limited because of the slow Wi-Fi.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • Actually getting a final project out and on time considering our delays just in the very beginning
  • An awesome UI given that only one of us had extensive frontend and React experience prior

What we learned

  • D3 + React patterns: Direct DOM manipulation with D3 while React manages the surrounding UI
  • Graph algorithms: Efficient edge deduplication and bidirectional relationship detection
  • Political transparency: Some entities have 50+ connections

What's next for Weyes

  • Add tracking for PAC/Super PAC donations
  • Add a live net worth estimator and visualizer
  • Push notifications to users of notable Congresspeople trading

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