Voting Blocs -- Who Votes Together, Who Pushes Policy

[evamaxfield]

Idea / Feature

Compare the voting records of each Councilmember (across a keyword if we get the Matter Index Pipeline going)

So, you punch in "Housing" or something, and it shows more or less where each Councilmember stands on the issue?

Can also do this for Matter Sponsor records to see who is “pushing” an issue, at least.

Use Case / User Story

User is about to vote in the upcoming election and care about two primary topics, housing and transportation, the user can navigate to a new tab in the CDP instance webpage called "Comparisons" (?), they can select any number of the current councilmembers and it will show the similarities and differences in their voting records. These differences, or highlights similarities, should help summarize a current members viewpoint on a topic and past voting record, ultimately to hopefully help them make their decision on if the elected still deserves their vote.

Solution

I like the idea of making a couple of plots and tables of info.

First, a plot that is maybe "average agreement with council" really just a summarization of how often they vote with the rest of the council.

Second, a plot that is maybe "agreement with each other" which is how often all of the selected councilmembers vote together (times they all voted the same / times they all voted on matters together in general)

Third is a table for counts of matters sponsored that have high value matter index scores for keyword?? Something like this:

Voting Member	Housing	Transportation	Homelessness	+
Jill	12	2	1
Bob	2	13	4

The + means the user can add a new keyword??

But that doesn't really get to it because the actual legislation could have been like anti-density housing for one person and pro-density housing for another person.

So you definitely need to have a table or plot or something that shows the difference in voting outcome on bills by topic??

Stakeholders

I feel like I should talk to so activists about this idea but internally this definitely needs backend, frontend, and A LOT of design work, esp visualization work.

[evamaxfield]

Major Dependencies

• matter index pipeline
• legislation page???