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California Civic Lab

Welcome to the California Civic Lab wiki! We're working to improve accessibility of local campaign finance data to ordinary voters across jurisdictions in California. Currently, campaign finance data is tied up in various forms, only eight percent of these jurisdictions provide this data in machine-readable digital form. For seventy-nine percent of California jurisdictions, forms are only available on request in paper form. We're hoping to change that.

We've submitted a proposal to the 2015 Knight News Challenge which provides more detail about our strategy.

Helpful background links on Campaign Finance:

• Campaign Finance - An overview on how campaign finances and disclosure laws in CA, and an example extension in San Diego.
• Campaign Data Formats - An overview of how campaign finances are mapped to various data formats.

Helpful technical links on app structure:

• Technical Overview - gives details on the overall app technical design and status.
• Mock-ups - example tables and visualizations representing information we want to share with users.
• Data relationships / Database schema - proposed design for database tables & API endpoints.
• Branch summary - summarizes what each code branch is doing, and where it's at.

Helpful links for getting involved:

• On-boarding a new city - How to get your city data added to the app.