PolDB

From Sunlabs wiki

Basic Idea

Build an open IMDB-like service for All 300,000+ elected officials in the country and build biographies on all of them much like the style of IMDB. Allow for community participation, submission and vetting.

Thoughts

In order to be successful at this, you have to really reach across the depth of candidate and elected official information to get every elected official. Getting state representatives, state senators, Governors, Senators, and Members of congress is fairly easy (at least grabbing their names). You can get those from Project Vote Smart but more local officials is more difficult. Volunteer help in local areas is likely necessary but finding automated services to pull in information from central areas (secretary of state offices, for instance) may need to be used as well.

Getting Project off the Ground

Raymond Yee has started exploring how to use Freebase as a starting point for organizing data about politicians. The hope is to exploit the good amount of contextual information already present in Freebase. See the PolDB base for the start of a prototype.