Civil Services is a collection of tools that make it possible for citizens to be a part of what is happening in their Local, State & Federal Governments.
The following is what I hope to achieve with Civil Services and the tasks I need to take to get us there:
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I am seeing that a fair number of activist organizations are often repeating work others have already completed. Since there is no central place for this research, everyone ends up doing it on their own, for their team's needs.
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Despite the vast amount of data that is available for Federal and State Legislators & Legislation, finding what you're looking for is incredibly difficult. Especially since some pieces of legislation use "tricky" wording to purposefully mislead the public.
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Access to City Government data from a central source is non-existent. If you are were researching which cities were attempting to pass, for example, new measures on Police Brutality, you cannot currently go to one source to find this information.
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More often than not, data a researcher finds online can be outdated or, worse, outright unusable. The data might be in a format the user cannot use. Frequently image assets are of variable sizes and dimension, even amongst the same project's source.
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I want to allow activists and other mission-driven groups to have a central platform to manage legislation that is relevant to their cause. I believe we can make a central place for people to do this research and our users efforts would be of great benefit to others in the community.
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As users of Civil Services locate key pieces of Legislation that are relevant to their mission, we will allow for a central tagging mechanism to allow users to add metadata to legislation. Tagging will add addition context to what each piece of Legislation is about and make it more accessible to those looking for it.
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Having an open central platform that immediately deploys data online will attract developers to contribute City Government data. Civil Services will stub out actual City Government code repositories that developers can use as a base for contributing to development. This method will also ensure stable integration into the core application goes smoothly.
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Having an open platform allows developers to contribute any missing data. We have already started to collect meaningful data such as Gender, Ethnicity, Social Media Links, etc. This level of detail will allow our users, as well as developers, to derive more meaningful insight from City, State & Federal Government Data.
To complete the solutions listed above, we will need to knock out the following items:
- Create US State Repository that contains information about each state in the USA ( just generic stuff for SEO / SEM purposes to drive traffic )
- Create US Senate Repository that contains information about current US Senators
- Create US House of Representatives Repository that contains information about current US Senators
- Build https://civil.services website to provide Federal Data ( Senate & House ) to Public. Focus on SEO / SEM implementation to make finding this data in Google super easy.
- Flush out City Council Repository as Base that other developers can use to quickly knock out multiple Cities.
- Create City Council Data for Top 50 US Populated Cities
- Integrate Top 50 US Cities into https://civil.services
- Connect City, State & Federal Data to their Respective Legislation ( using existing API's for each level of Government )
- Connect City, State & Federal Legislators to Past, Present & Future pieces of Legislation so users of our site can quickly find where their Representative / Legislators stand.
- Connect this to the existing Contact information we will already have in place to allow users to use Phone, Email, Website, Facebook, Twitter & Snail Mail to contact their Representative / Legislator.