New Design & Logo: First of all, and very importantly, VoteReports is much easier on the eyes than it once was, thanks to a much cleaner, crisper, elegant design adapted from thijsjacobs’ excellent Tumblr theme, Stationary. Right up at the top, you’ll see a great logo designed by Ali Felski of the the Sunlight Foundation. Beyond that, we’ve taken steps to streamline and simplify the interface, putting all but the most important things just out of sight, but always within reach.
Published and Personal Reports: Now, when you create a report by default it’s considered a “Personal” report, which means it won’t show up in lists or searches on the site, for example on the front page. However, anyone can still access your personal report via the url for that page. This way you can share it with friends, family or on your blog, for example.
Once you have your report ready, complete with scores, you can hit the “Publish” button on the report page, to make it show up throughout the site, making it more discoverable by others on the site.
Report Thumbnails: To make it easier for people to get a sense of what a report is at a glance, you can now add a thumbnail image which will be shown wherever your report is shown. Be it a logo or a sense of your subject, we think it’s a great way of giving character to your report. Once you upload an image, just remember to crop it to suit the available space!
New Feature: Off-line Report Scoring
Any time you, as a report creator, update a report, there’s some real computational heavy lifting going on to generate the scores for the new criteria. Previously, you’d have to wait patiently while the operation went on. Well now reports are updated in the background, so you can go about your business more quickly. Whenever a report has an update in the works, you’ll see a notice like the one above, while in the mean time, the old scores will be shown.
Easier Navigation: Now you can find politicians representing specific parts of the country: just put in a zip code, state or address and we’ll show you just politicians representing that area. Likewise, you can select whether to show politicians not currently in office.
Location Guessing: Not only that, we’ll try to guess where you are, and pre-populate the search with that. It’s not always correct, but we find it’s a great way to helps narrow things down, and it’s easy to correct when wrong, just correct the search box and hit “Go!”
Our New Slogan: Knowing is Half the Ballot
We have an excellent new slogan, a banner which I think we’ll be flying for some time. Thanks to Keith Gould of Daily Mugshot for the suggestion!
As you may have noticed, VoteReports has come a long way in the past few weeks! Just to mark our progress, we have a whole series of what we’ve been up to.
Why exactly do we collect, analyze, and share more data on baseball than on our own government? To some degree, it’s a combination of interest and ease. Bonus prediction, an easy one: It will be much easier to collect, analyze, and share government information in 2010-12 than it was in 2009.
The maintenance took a good bit longer than expected, but then we’re new to this and learning. In any case, the site is updated, and with this you should be seeing much more frequent updates from us.
A few of the updates:
Beyond that, we’ve done a major shift to relying on our own local set of data, sourced from the excellent GovTrack and Sunlight Labs, rather than relying on web service requests in real time. Over time this should mean a much quicker, more comprehensive and more robust site, and should speed our development along.
We know the site has a long way to go, and will have more to say on that soon - but we’re confident we’ll be ready to help voters be “in the know” well before this year’s elections, and we’re racing toward that. In the mean time, we hope you’ll be understanding, gives us feedback and watch us grow.
Here’s to a new era of informed politics!
Executive Director,
Ben Woosley
We’re working on a major upgrade to VoteReports which should mean quicker and easier and access to bills and their votes, along with plenty more. We should have the site back up shortly.