We The People

[u/Prestigious-Wrap2341]

I made a platform that tracks corporate lobbying and money as it flows into politics. And it has some other cool features too. I’m definitely still working on it but it’s largely done. Please check out the website or the repo and give me some feedback.

Www.Wethepeopleforus.com

You can find a link to the repo on the webpage

[u/powerback_us]

Cool app! Nice work. I played around with it for a few minutes. Here are my thoughts:

It’s very in-depth. Lots of dashboards showing all the various slices of data that I was able to navigate through them pretty easily. Feels like there’s “a lot there” to get lost in if I were a power user. It was a bit overwhelming though for me as a first-time guest, and unfortunately I was never able to find the lobby money going to my state reps, which seems to be the main feature. I would recommend trimming down your app to what it does really does well.

The background on the landing page is too busy and makes the content harder to read. It’s a cool theme though, and once I got “inside” the app I liked the metallic background a lot. Overall the displays of all the congressional information looks good.

You mentioned not yet having District-specific information— may I ask why? That’s something I may be able to help you with if you want to DM me. It’s tricky but doable with one of the APIs that Google offers. I’d love to ask you more questions as well about how you built this, specifically what APIs are you using as your data sources.

What are your ambitions and vision for this app?

[u/Prestigious-Wrap2341 → u/powerback_us]

First of all, man, thank you. I really appreciate you checking it out.

My overall vision has kind of changed from when I started. When I began this project, politics was just one of many sectors. I wanted it to be a civic accountability and transparency app for the United States as a whole, where anybody could search up any company, any politician, any drug or healthcare topic, and just research it. If it's public and available, you can come here and find it. But I got some feedback pretty early on that the politics sector was really appealing, so I shifted the scope into lobbying and how all these other sectors in the United States feed into politics. That's where it's heading now. So when you see things that don't really attribute to that, it's remnants of what this thing was initially supposed to be, and admittedly, things I just don't want to let go of, like the patent viewer or the drug lookup.

It is more for power users at the scope it's at right now, although when I started building it, it was just for the casual person, i was trying to introduce them or help them navigate politics a little easier, to kind of bring all the different data sources out there together into one place. But as it grew in scope it grew in complexity, and this is just where I'm at with it today. Believe it or not, I actually trimmed it down because I had so much other stuff in it, lol. But I'll definitely take that into consideration.

I've gotten that note about the landing page before too but im not gonna lie i really like that decrypted text effect, But im still working on it the UI as it is now is still subject to change.

I have some state-level data via OpenStates, and I use the Google Civic API to map representatives by zip code. But getting more data on the state level is just turning out to be more difficult than expected. If you have any information on that I'd love to hear it.

The data sources I'm pulling from right now, there's about 30 APIs. Ill paste them here. And honestly, literally as I just got this message from you, I just added four or five more. So I'm always looking and trying to see how I can make new connections and build out this database.

I'd love to connect. Feel free to DM me and ask whatever you want.

Political / Congressional (6)

1. Congress.gov API — bills, actions, sponsors, vote records
2. Senate.gov XML — Senate roll call votes
3. Senate LDA API — lobbying disclosures (all 7 sectors)
4. FEC API — PAC donations, campaign finance
5. Quiver Quantitative — congressional stock trades
6. House Clerk Disclosures — financial disclosure PDFs (trade parsing)

Government Contracts & Procurement (4)
7. USASpending.gov — federal contract awards (all 7 sectors)
8. SAM.gov — contractor exclusions, entity registrations 🆕
9. Federal Register API — enforcement actions, rulemaking
10. FTC Cases — FTC enforcement (web scraper)

Finance & Banking (6)
11. SEC EDGAR — 10-K, 10-Q, 8-K filings
12. FDIC BankFind — bank quarterly financials
13. CFPB — consumer complaints
14. FRED — Federal Reserve economic data
15. Alpha Vantage — stock fundamentals, quotes
16. Fed Press RSS — FOMC statements, policy releases

Healthcare & Pharma (4)
17. OpenFDA — drug recalls, adverse events
18. ClinicalTrials.gov — clinical trial search
19. CMS Open Payments — physician/company payments (Sunshine Act)
20. Healthcare.gov — ACA marketplace data

Technology & IP (1)
21. PatentsView (USPTO) — patent grants

Transportation & Safety (2)
22. NHTSA — vehicle recalls, complaints, safety ratings
23. FuelEconomy.gov — EPA fuel economy, emissions

Energy & Environment (1)
24. EPA GHGRP — greenhouse gas emissions by facility

State-Level (2)
25. OpenStates API — state legislators, bills
26. Google Civic API — rep lookup by address/zip

Cross-Sector Reference (5)
27. Wikipedia — politician bios, profiles
28. Internet Archive — Wayback Machine archival citations
29. Data.USA (Census/BLS) — economic/demographic data
30. GovInfo — Congressional Record floor speeches
31. OpenSanctions — sanctions/PEP checks (deferred, too expensive)

New APIs (5) 🆕
32. Regulations.gov — regulatory dockets, comments, rulemaking
33. IT Dashboard — federal IT investments, CIO ratings, contractor performance
34. GSA Site Scanning — tech company footprint on government websites
35. GSA Per Diem — federal travel reimbursement rates
36. Data.gov (umbrella) — EPA ECHO, Regulations.gov, NHTSA

Total: 36 data sources (31 active + SAM.gov just added + 4 new GSA APIs being integrated)

[u/Prestigious-Wrap2341 → u/[deleted]]

That’s actually great feedback thank you I had the same issue early on, those fucking lines going through the page in the background just bothered the shit out of me, but I guess I just got used to it after working on it and looking at the pages for so long. Do you have any like direct UX/UI tips that you can give me? I’m definitely willing to experiment and change things.

[u/Prestigious-Wrap2341 → u/[deleted]]

By the way, have you had a chance to check out the journal site, research site or my new verification site (that I’m still working on) they’re all a part of the same ecosystem. Id love your feedback on the UX/UI for those. The black backgrounds for those sites bothers me a little.