MAPLight.org
MAPLight.org is an award-winning site that illuminates the connection between money and politics. The MAPLight.org database brings together information on campaign contributions and votes in U.S. Congress and the California legislature. While voting records and campaign contributions are both public information, it is the power of Drupal's database integration capability that can transform these figures into critical analysis.
Challenges & Needs
MAPLight's success depends on its ability to gather information from a variety of public information sources and display this data in a user-friendly manner. This data includes bill texts, voting records, all campaign contributions to every legislator and interests opposing and supporting each bill. The format of the source data varies and comes from THOMAS at the Library of Congress, the FEC and campaign contributions from OpenSecrets.org. California legislative data is from Legislative Council of California and the National Institute on Money in State Politics.
Solution
Thanks to our custom Drupal development and database parsing, MAPLight connects campaign contributions and votes for U.S. Congress, providing groundbreaking transparency so that bloggers, journalists, and citizens can hold legislators accountable. Advomatic's development team custom-built the Legislature module for this project. The site pulls data from FEC databases, and scrapes data from Thomas.loc.gov in order to directly show the monies' related legislative outcome. This transparency can lead to a more informed public and spur vital election reform. As part of the marketing strategy, Advomatic built embeddable widgets. The widgets are customizable and can include any information available elsewhere on the site.
Since its launch in 2007, MAPLight has won many awards, including:
- First Prize NetSquared Innovation Awards - May 2007
- Winner of a World Summit Award for e.Governance - September 2007
- Finalist in the Stockholm Challenge for Public Administration - May 2008
- Finalist in the NetSquared Innovation Awards 2008
- Nominee for the Webby Awards 2008, Best Politics Website
- One of eight recipients of the 2008 Knight-Batten Awards for Innovations in Journalism - August 2008
Services We Offer
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Meet Our Team
