New Georgia-Election Money - API Project

Project Overview

Objective: Provide a web-api that exposes public data on Georgia political candidates and their funding sources.

Sponsor: New Georgia Project

Affiliation: Code for Atlanta

Project status: Research & planning

Project Summary The purpose of this project is to collect data from public, Georgia goverment webistes, and present the data in a more useful and helpful manner as an API, with the eventual goal of providing input for end-user apps that can easily let non-technical people have clear access to the publicly reported funding sources for Georgia politicians. This project is what you might call "Phase I" of a longer vision. Here we are just obtaining and exposing data via a web-api (RESTful interface), that client apps will be able to use. Once done, this will open several opportunities for using the data, such as mobile apps, reports & data analysis, but all of those are outside the scope of this project. This project is strictly about obtaining and exposing the data via a web-api, and any steps along the way to achieving that goal.

Needed Skills

• Web scraping
• Database
• Web API (REST)
• Data analysis
• Subject matter expect on Georgia government offices
• Security

Communication: Slack channel: Code for Atlanta/#ElectionMoney

Disclaimer This project will be obtaining data from publicly available data sources, in a manner that is consistent with state and federal law.

Interested in joining us? Participant signup sheet (No commitment required.)

Note to participants: If you'd like to recommend a special tool or technology, please read over the project description first to get a good understanding of what we're trying to do, then write up a summary page with the following info and post it on our Slack channel:

1. Description of the tool/technology. And it's cost (Very important, since we're currently a $0 budget project).
2. Explain pros & cons of using it.
3. Explain which problem in this project it would solve. Note: If you expand the scope of the project to answer this question, you're cheating. :)

Need access? Contact Wayne Schroder at GratefulBayou@gmail.com, or message me on the slack channel.

Goals

Technology

TBD

Data Sources

Georgia Government Transparencyand Campaign Finance Commission (http://media.ethics.ga.gov) To see campaign reports:

1. Go to the Georgia Campaign reports page
2. Go to Search Campaign > Search by Office Type
3. Set "Election Year" to the current year
4. Select a value for "Office Type" and "Office Name"
5. Click on [Search for Filer]
6. When presented with list of candidates, click on "View' for one
7. Click on "Campaign Contribution Reports - EFiled"
8. Click on "View Report"
9. Click on "View Contributions"
10. Click on "Click here to export the result to Excel"

Short Term Needs

1. Analyze and document candidate funding data from media.ethics.ga.gov. Metadata needed:
   • Dataset name
   • Field name
   • Field type & length
   • Special values

Project Roadmap

TBD

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