Portland Maine Voting Record | Portland Civic Design Fest 2017

Project Champions: Seth W. Klein & Tyler Constance

What is your project about?

Seth: We were seeing lots of people interested in learning about how the City Council has voted in the past so we started a voting record project to help them out. Whether you’re making scorecards, or maps of permit grants, or what have you, we want this to be a great tool.

Tyler: This project creates a way to input and make sense of City Council votes that are currently trapped in PDFs on the city website. Having data from these city council orders will enable us (and others!) to be better informed about local politics, and will allow for the discovery of trends in data. We’ll be able to see how individual councilors have voted on issues. Future milestones (or other projects that use our API) will be able to do things like map permit requests in downtown Portland over the past decade, see which Councillor has voted “no” the most, or see when the council was most unified (and most divided).

What do you have so far?

Seth: We’re part way through establishing the technical foundation for the site, and we’ve started collecting use cases.

Tyler: We have a static website in React and Hapi, and we’ll be bringing in Redux to manage state. You can view our current source at https://github.com/sethwklein/voting-record and get familiar with the code, or even submit a pull request.

What do you need?

Seth: We’re very interested in use cases. Anything you’d like to know about how the Portland City Council has voted in the past is stuff we need to know! We also welcome work from other professional or passionate web developers as we get the technical foundations of the site established.

Tyler: We need to know what people need from this tool to make sure we solve the right problems. We aren’t experts in local politics, so we don’t know what information is important to take from the existing PDFs. Let us know what features you need and we’ll see if we can incorporate them. If you’re a developer, look through our source and let us know if you can contribute!

Don’t forget to RSVP to Portland Civic Design Fest, September 23rd at Mechanics Hall, Portland, Maine. Part of the National Day of Civic Hacking!

Hosted by Code for Maine, Portland Global Shapers, and Maine Charitable Mechanics Association. Sponsored by Ad Hoc, Workplace Transformation Facilitation, Seth Rigoletti: Leadership Coach, Project Login, and IDEXX.