Use cases

We put out a public request for proposals from news organizations, asking what they'd like in NJ politics news app. Here are the responses we've received so far, that we kicked around at our planning meetup. Our reactions are in bold below each item.

• A super people finder. Maybe a wiki for trusted news organizations to share/connect donors. Can we connect the dots and work together to clean up the mess in the data? A good idea, but incredibly hard to do in a day, and would require an enormous amount of buy-in from many news orgs to make it work. We don't think it's doable for this hack project.

• An app that integrates the functions of Legiscan with FollowTheMoney. This would allow anyone to know when a particular bill is up for a vote in a committee and be able quickly identify who are the biggest contributors to the committee members. It would be nice to be able to create an email alert as a bill moves to the next stage. This is an interesting idea, but sounds like it would primarily be a tool for reporters. We initially thought we might have enough participants to take on a newsroom tool like this, but as our discussions went on, we realized we'd need to focus on a single, user-facing app.

• It would be most useful in terms of the ELEC data, is a tool that would allow for pulling out the data on a continual basis -- rather than a one-time shot -- if the data you are talking about are the periodic reports filed by candidates and committees that are typically able to be viewed only using ELEC's filenet viewer. Additionally, we are interested in a bill tracker that we could use to specify a number of bills on topics we cover (in education, health, energy and environment) and have a tool that keeps track of their status, updating it whenever appropriate. We liked this idea, but thought it was good close to what MinnPost does with its Bill Tracker, the code for which has been open-sourced. We didn't want to reinvent that wheel.

• Programmatically connect the dots between contributions and legislation or actions by the recipients on behalf of their patrons. This is the Holy Grail for politics and data reporters, but something we were certain we couldn't do in such a narrowly focused hack day.

#The decision We really appreciated all of the input we received from journalists across the state, but ultimately we settled on a different use case that we decided to focus on:

users who want to understand how industries are spending money collectively to finance political campaigns, and who backs the most winners and losers. Ideally, we want to present that information in an engaging, illuminating and fun way for users.