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Planning meeting notes from 9 12 13

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Tom Meagher edited this page Sep 13, 2013 · 5 revisions

We met Thursday night, Sept. 12 at the Makerbar in Hoboken to try to choose a project idea for the "Law, Money and Politics" hack day. We also wanted to craft a plan of attack to give us the best chance of succeeding in our goal of building a web app in a day.

We discussed our:

Each is discussed in depth on those pages, but here's where we stand right now.

#Goals and Purpose

Our purpose is to build and deploy in one day a full-fledged, MVP news app on the web.

This app will bring new insight into the political process and campaign fundraising. This app will programmatically ingest new data and update itself, requiring little to no human involvement in the upkeep of it's core functionality.

This app will give users a way to engage with it and to share it and a reason to come back and visit later. This app should be fully-responsive and offer a way for news organizations or other groups to embed it on their sites, with our credits and branding on it.

#The data sources

##The winners We looked at a broad swath of possible data sources for this application, noted below, and ultimately decided for many reasons to focus on these few.

On a side note, we loved that Sunlight has a fast and easy way to explore their APIs through their website. Try it yourself.

##A close second We'll also consider bringing in data from these secondary sources, if the need arises.

#The use cases 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 influence 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.

#Our product

##The finalists We wrapped up by focusing on three ideas, and we're looking for input from the rest of the group:

  • Rate/rank the industries/employers by how much they donate to campaigns and parties over time
  • A win/loss record for donors/industries
  • Where is the money coming from? Is more money coming to races from out of the district or out of the state than in it?

For the presentation, we had two ideas that we liked that may be separate components, but not the primary interface.

  • A quiz. We give you two industries, can you guess which one gave more money to candidate X?
  • Using a baseball card-style presentation for detailed stats on industries or recipients.

For continued planning discussions and organizing the project and workflow, we decided that a Google Group email list would work, along with using Github's wiki and issues to manage the project.

#Next steps

  • Set deadlines and milestones
  • Pick one idea
  • Discuss features and functionality for that idea
  • Discuss design
  • Make sure we understand the APIs thoroughly, a task which Joe Kokenge is working on.
  • Divvy up the project into tasks.
  • Have people choose roles and assign tasks to roles.
  • Make it happen.

If you see anything that you want to change, go for it. If you have questions, email Tom at hello[at]tommeagher[dot]com.

Attendees: Tom Meagher (DFM), Fred Kaimann (Star-Ledger), Eric Sagara (ProPublica), Joe Kokenge (ProPublica), Bert Hartmann (Makerbar) and on the Hangout, Margaret Kim, Patrick Murray and Samuel Carvalhos.

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