The non-partisan Drum Major Institute for Public Policy (DMI) issues annual reports analyzing the impact of domestic legislation on America’s middle class. Literally grading Members of Congress based on whether their votes are for or against "legislation significant to America's current and aspiring middle class."
Conservative politicians who serve only the interests of the rich and "act in opposition to the interests and opinions of nine-tenths of their constituents," have always needed to be called to task - in 1798 the job was done by liberal newspapers and Democratic-Republican Congressmen. Today, this function is done online, and now, it's being done in real-time with TheMiddleClass.org
New this year, DMI's scorecard is live while the legislative session is still in session, making it far more accessible and powerful. This rolling report card works on behalf of us, the nine-tenths. TheMiddleClass.org clearly shows what Congress is voting on as they are voting on it.
How we built this is how we love to work - in partnership - in this case with the world-class policy team of Drum Major Institute, their fabulous designer, their brilliant data manager and renowned online communication director.
Like our work with MAPLight.org, DMI's score card works by importing legislation and legislator information via the GovTrack API, which regularly scrapes data from Thomas.loc.gov. We made it easy for the good folks at DMI to add new bills to the scorecard by creating a legislation CCK field module -- the administrator simply enters in the bill number, chooses the vote from a drop-down list, selects the middle class position, and Drupal handles the rest.
But collecting the data is only half the battle; we implemented Randi Hazan's excellent design to present the scorecard data in a myriad of useful ways. Users can view how Congress performed on an individual bill, investigate the performance of the individual legislators in their state, and view the current scores and grade history of any individual legislator -- all presented clearly with dynamic infographics built upon the GD Graphics Library.
We also worked hard with DMI to develop widgets that allow any blogger or web site operator to display scorecard data on their own site. With our easy-to-use jQuery-enhanced widget builder, you can pick any group of legislators or bills whose middle class significance you want to highlight to your site visitors.
We are proud to work hard for good folks like DMI who do good work.
