The legacy of SOPA may be citizen developers familiar with congressional datasets.
— Randy Meech (@randyme) April 9, 2012
I launched Sopatrack in late December, 2011. At the time, SOPA and PIPA were being rushed through Congress without public debate. There was major, one-sided funding for these issues, and it was alarming how much traction that could get.
Sopatrack had a few goals:
The site was immediately popular, with lots of press coverage including The Atlantic, Mashable, Lifehacker, and Hacker News. Twitter, Facebook, and Google drove the majority of the traffic, which peaked at over 40,000 unique daily visitors on key days around the issues.
The wider internet community also rose up, and Congress eventually tabled these bills. Great sites like SOPA Opera were developed, and ultimately Google, Wikipedia, and Reddit staged major actions so that their users would understand the issue. The resources of SunlightLabs, MapLight, and OpenSecrets were hugely helpful to developers and voters.
But there was still more data on other bills, and I wondered what Sopatrack would look like if automatically applied to all bills.
The new Sopatrack has the same goals as the original, except that it will work across all bills in the 112th Congress with contribution data from MapLight. Since there's more data across more issues, the site also tracks how often a congressperson votes on the side of the greater contributions. Individual positions on pre-vote issues will not be tracked.
The votes with the money percentage is also applied to each state for all their congresspeople, and to all Congress.
Built in NYC by @randyme with the awesome data and APIs from MapLight and SunlightLabs.
