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To everyone posting here: I am a creator of this service. If you'd like to get in contact with us, email secure@politiwatch.org! We're extremely encouraged by

To everyone posting here: I am a creator of this service. If you'd like to get in contact with us, email secure@politiwatch.org! We're extremely encouraged by all the positive feedback here, and we're glad to provide a service that you all found helpful.

eamann 10y ago
I think the service is awesome ... but why the "enter your email address" part? You can locate people just by zipcode (and omitting the email still works). What are you using our addresses for? What is your privacy policy? Why ask for nonessential information in the first place?
- zackkitzmiller 10y ago
  It asks for address (not email address) to better locate your local representatives.
- epoch_100 10y ago
  It doesn't ask for your email address, just your home address and your ZIP code. It's not unessential information. To quote DannyBee, who answered this same question below: >"Just entering your zip code is sufficient to obtain a list." >This is not even, sadly, close to true. In the US, there are types of political districts that split down the middle of apartment buildings, etc. The federal districts are pretty sane. At the state and local level, pretty much anything goes. >While it's true there are a few areas where you can use zipcode and get reasonable results for some types of representatives, it's simply not correct for the US writ large for most state level political positions. >We once started generating shape files for different types of political districts we had, but for some types in the US, they aren't closed polygons, or they require 3 dimensions (the apartment building split), or ... In some cases they are self-intersecting, due to border disputes among states, etc. Or you can prove the data is wrong, or ... Heck, in some cases, the local and state authorities have official data that disagrees on the political districts and nobody has ever really noticed! >This is one of those things people think should be really easy, and in pretty much every country but the US it is. In the US, it just varies wildly in difficulty. >Doing representatives at least means people are willing to accept some error rate, which makes it a little easier, but not much. >(For reference: I started Google's politics and elections engineering team, and co-started the voter information project to try to open up some of this kind of political data for real )
shorttime 10y ago
This is amazing. Is there anyway to pull in opposing candidates during elections? I had a huge issue finding information on each side during the last election.
spilk 10y ago
I'm just getting a "quota exceeded" error when entering my address.
emcrazyone 10y ago
I get a 403 error, you've exceeded your quota.
mistermann 10y ago
I hope you consider greatly expanding the scope of what this service does. Someone needs to take a new approach to educating citizens about issues in an objective, non-biased manner. Democracy is in a really poor state imho, things like this are what's needed to repair it.
- memco 10y ago
  > Someone needs to take a new approach to educating citizens about issues in an objective, non-biased manner Not just issues, but even just positions. I honestly have no idea what several of these people's jobs are let alone their personal character and values. Would be handy for this site to link to a description of the position on wikipedia to find out what ways this person would be in a position to effect change in my life.
mozumder 10y ago
This could use info on when elections for each representative position happens, including primaries if possible. Something to keep on a calendar. Just noticed it's also missing local judges. Also, contact info for government services itself - courts, schools, police depta, etc..
someone7x 10y ago
This is amazing. I once started trying to make something similar, but would also try to rank how "diluted" you are in the democracy by ranking your representative by a historical monarch that ruled over a similar sized constituency. I approached it by trying to work from the census data but found it too difficult to work with. What data sources are you working with? Do you offer an API?
brudgers 10y ago
It might make sense to list officials in a different order. The utility of the top answer, POTUS, is probably lower than the county commissioner or State Agricultural Tsar or Utilities Poobah. Maybe a multi-column layout? Anyway, nice work.
brudgers 10y ago
It might make sense to list officials in a different order. The utility of the top answer, POTUS, is probably lower than the county commissioner or State Agricultural Tsar or Utilities Poobah. Maybe a multi-column layout? Anyway, nice work.
thex10 10y ago
This is awesome. Are you looking for engineers/volunteers? Also, don't listen to all these feature requests and get scope creep. The only additional thing I'd love to see is even more granular levels of officials, but I know how difficult/nonexistent the data is there.
- epoch_100 10y ago
  Email us at secure@politiwatch.org if you'd like to get involved. Thanks for the interest!
- tfgg 10y ago
  Agree with not getting involved in feature creep. There are hundreds of failed civic tech projects, mostly because they tried to do too much. Users do want "positions" or "issues" etc. but those are really hard to find / build good data for. That's the next level! epoch_100: Stick to making an awesome data source and interface to solve the one problem you've picked :) In the UK mySociety does similar things, their WriteToThem services gives a drill-down on the politicians for a given postcode. You'd probably be really interested in their http://www.everypolitician.org/ http://www.everypolitician.org/ project, which is trying to do this for the entire planet -- but generally working from the top down. I'm involved with https://democracyclub.org.uk/ https://democracyclub.org.uk/, which works particularly on developing really good election data. epoch_100, reach out to one of us if you want to chat :)

eamann 10y ago

I think the service is awesome ... but why the "enter your email address" part? You can locate people just by zipcode (and omitting the email still works). What are you using our addresses for? What is your privacy policy? Why ask for nonessential information in the first place?

zackkitzmiller 10y ago
It asks for address (not email address) to better locate your local representatives.
epoch_100 10y ago
It doesn't ask for your email address, just your home address and your ZIP code. It's not unessential information. To quote DannyBee, who answered this same question below: >"Just entering your zip code is sufficient to obtain a list." >This is not even, sadly, close to true. In the US, there are types of political districts that split down the middle of apartment buildings, etc. The federal districts are pretty sane. At the state and local level, pretty much anything goes. >While it's true there are a few areas where you can use zipcode and get reasonable results for some types of representatives, it's simply not correct for the US writ large for most state level political positions. >We once started generating shape files for different types of political districts we had, but for some types in the US, they aren't closed polygons, or they require 3 dimensions (the apartment building split), or ... In some cases they are self-intersecting, due to border disputes among states, etc. Or you can prove the data is wrong, or ... Heck, in some cases, the local and state authorities have official data that disagrees on the political districts and nobody has ever really noticed! >This is one of those things people think should be really easy, and in pretty much every country but the US it is. In the US, it just varies wildly in difficulty. >Doing representatives at least means people are willing to accept some error rate, which makes it a little easier, but not much. >(For reference: I started Google's politics and elections engineering team, and co-started the voter information project to try to open up some of this kind of political data for real )

shorttime 10y ago

This is amazing. Is there anyway to pull in opposing candidates during elections? I had a huge issue finding information on each side during the last election.

spilk 10y ago

I'm just getting a "quota exceeded" error when entering my address.

emcrazyone 10y ago

I get a 403 error, you've exceeded your quota.

mistermann 10y ago

I hope you consider greatly expanding the scope of what this service does. Someone needs to take a new approach to educating citizens about issues in an objective, non-biased manner. Democracy is in a really poor state imho, things like this are what's needed to repair it.

memco 10y ago
> Someone needs to take a new approach to educating citizens about issues in an objective, non-biased manner Not just issues, but even just positions. I honestly have no idea what several of these people's jobs are let alone their personal character and values. Would be handy for this site to link to a description of the position on wikipedia to find out what ways this person would be in a position to effect change in my life.

mozumder 10y ago

This could use info on when elections for each representative position happens, including primaries if possible. Something to keep on a calendar. Just noticed it's also missing local judges. Also, contact info for government services itself - courts, schools, police depta, etc..

someone7x 10y ago

This is amazing. I once started trying to make something similar, but would also try to rank how "diluted" you are in the democracy by ranking your representative by a historical monarch that ruled over a similar sized constituency. I approached it by trying to work from the census data but found it too difficult to work with. What data sources are you working with? Do you offer an API?

brudgers 10y ago

It might make sense to list officials in a different order. The utility of the top answer, POTUS, is probably lower than the county commissioner or State Agricultural Tsar or Utilities Poobah. Maybe a multi-column layout? Anyway, nice work.

brudgers 10y ago

thex10 10y ago

This is awesome. Are you looking for engineers/volunteers? Also, don't listen to all these feature requests and get scope creep. The only additional thing I'd love to see is even more granular levels of officials, but I know how difficult/nonexistent the data is there.

epoch_100 10y ago
Email us at secure@politiwatch.org if you'd like to get involved. Thanks for the interest!
tfgg 10y ago
Agree with not getting involved in feature creep. There are hundreds of failed civic tech projects, mostly because they tried to do too much. Users do want "positions" or "issues" etc. but those are really hard to find / build good data for. That's the next level! epoch_100: Stick to making an awesome data source and interface to solve the one problem you've picked :) In the UK mySociety does similar things, their WriteToThem services gives a drill-down on the politicians for a given postcode. You'd probably be really interested in their http://www.everypolitician.org/ http://www.everypolitician.org/ project, which is trying to do this for the entire planet -- but generally working from the top down. I'm involved with https://democracyclub.org.uk/ https://democracyclub.org.uk/, which works particularly on developing really good election data. epoch_100, reach out to one of us if you want to chat :)