#202 Center for Technology and Civic Life

“Who represents me?” and “What’s on my ballot?” seem like they should be easy questions to answer. But with nearly 8,000 offices in charge of running elections in the US, this basic information exists in wildly different places and formats across the country - if it’s published online at all.

The Center for Technology and Civic Life collects this disaggregated candidate and elected official information and turn it into standardized datasets for use by technologists, civic engagement organizations, and researchers. These datasets are matched to political geographies via address, and are free and open for anyone to use.

Tiana Epps-Johnson and Donny Bridges will show what data they currently have available and talk about their plans for the 2016 election. They hope that the Chi Hack Night community will use this data to build awesome stuff, and would love to hear ways that we can make their data more useful.

At the very least, you’ll will come away with a newfound appreciation of the most important piece of civic tech in America - the fax machine.