Influence is an open-source project to visualize campaign contributions and explore the impact of money on democracy. Many websites offer government transparency data but we felt they made a common mistake: with so much data available, these sites felt compelled to show it all. It is hard to draw meaningful conclusions from a jumbled pile of numbers in bare spreadsheets. We wanted our app to show a smaller set of data visualized in a compelling way, allowing people to more easily draw their own conclusions without injecting any partisan bias.
Influence was created at Hack Reactor by:
You can learn more about the team here. (We're all for hire!)
Influence became the deployed web app Tilden. Here's a quick walkthrough of functionality:
Search for your legislator by clicking your state/district, enter your zip code or city, or geolocate using your computer's current location.
See campaign donations, top contributors, and personal information about members of Congress.
Compare legislators' contributors and donation amounts in a head-to-head matchup. This view will show any contributors that the two legislators have in common. The D3 circle graphs show the relative sizes of top donors to each representative.
Search for the top words used by an individual legislator, or see how often a word or phrase has been used in Congress since 1996.
View the full text of bills in Congress. Search for bills by issue/word or select from a list of the most recent bills. Comment on your findings in the Disqus comments below each bill.
Influence is an AngularJS app written in CoffeeScript. It uses a Node.js API server with ActionHero.js and a PostgreSQL database. Test coverage is provided by Travis-CI.
This was created using the Yeoman Angular Generator. The bootstrap files were replaced with bootstrap-stylus and Angular UI Bootstrap Directives
`npm install -g bower grunt-cli` unless you have them already
`npm install`
`bower install`
`grunt dev`
`http://localhost:8080`
Have Yeoman installed globally
Have Yeoman Angular Generator installed
Follow the directions here USING flags: --coffee --minsafe
- Node
- after node is installed run:
npm install -g bower grunt-cli yo generator-angular - Bower
- Grunt-CLI
- yo and angular-generator info the Yeoman Section above
Influence is licensed under the Affero General Public License, which is like the GPL but requires you provide access to the source code for any modified versions that are running publicly (among other things). The intent is to make sure that anyone improving the software makes those improvements available to others, as we have to them.
Influence uses API data from The Sunlight Foundation, The New York Times, Little Sis, and Influence Explorer. For full information about attribution, visit the Tilden app online.