Title: Connect 2 Congress: Visual Analytics for Civic Oversight
Author: Peter Kinnaird
Publisher: CHI 2010: Imagine all the People, April 10-15, 2010
Summary
Connect 2 Congress (C2C) is a website dedicated to showing the voting trends of congressional representatives over time. The authors of this paper use Congress' voluminous publicly available role call data to fill their models. In a representative democracy such as our own, citizens must be able to make informed voting decisions for the system to work ideally. This is possible through a variety of information sources. The authors find the plethora of information sources however, to be a problem.
Given the complexity of the roll call data, citizens need help in deciphering what it all means. They typically turn to journals or periodicals to make sense of a lot of it, however, those sources typically do not tell the whole story. An interactive visualized system however, would reduce the overhead and abstract the data set in a way that is easily visualized and understood.
The system was designed with four distinct groups in mind: social scientists, politicians, journalists and informed voters. Social scientists often want to look at trends and extrapolate conclusions from there. It is obvious the usefulness this system would be to politicians and journalists. For the "informed voter", it may be slightly overkill, but it can be good for those who want to learn how to use it. They can search for dates and political events, which could be very beneficial in seeing how your representatives sided with particular issues.
Discussion
I liked this article a lot more than the last few I have read. Why? It actually had to do with computers! With all of the misinformation out there, tools like this are very helpful for educating our society. We don't have a true democracy; we have a representative democracy.
The electoral college was created way back when in order to ensure that the best candidates were elected. Back then, people weren't able to access information as readily as today. They didn't want uninformed voters making all the decisions on ignorance. It is amazing today that despite all of the technology and access to information, there are still so many that don't take advantage of it. They are far more content to let other people create their own conclusions. Hopefully more projects like this will enable people to take a more proactive approach to their elected officials. This was a very good example of using technology to abstract a very complex system.
Summary
Connect 2 Congress (C2C) is a website dedicated to showing the voting trends of congressional representatives over time. The authors of this paper use Congress' voluminous publicly available role call data to fill their models. In a representative democracy such as our own, citizens must be able to make informed voting decisions for the system to work ideally. This is possible through a variety of information sources. The authors find the plethora of information sources however, to be a problem.
Given the complexity of the roll call data, citizens need help in deciphering what it all means. They typically turn to journals or periodicals to make sense of a lot of it, however, those sources typically do not tell the whole story. An interactive visualized system however, would reduce the overhead and abstract the data set in a way that is easily visualized and understood.
The system was designed with four distinct groups in mind: social scientists, politicians, journalists and informed voters. Social scientists often want to look at trends and extrapolate conclusions from there. It is obvious the usefulness this system would be to politicians and journalists. For the "informed voter", it may be slightly overkill, but it can be good for those who want to learn how to use it. They can search for dates and political events, which could be very beneficial in seeing how your representatives sided with particular issues.
Discussion
I liked this article a lot more than the last few I have read. Why? It actually had to do with computers! With all of the misinformation out there, tools like this are very helpful for educating our society. We don't have a true democracy; we have a representative democracy.
The electoral college was created way back when in order to ensure that the best candidates were elected. Back then, people weren't able to access information as readily as today. They didn't want uninformed voters making all the decisions on ignorance. It is amazing today that despite all of the technology and access to information, there are still so many that don't take advantage of it. They are far more content to let other people create their own conclusions. Hopefully more projects like this will enable people to take a more proactive approach to their elected officials. This was a very good example of using technology to abstract a very complex system.
Glad to see I'm not the only one who's happy to actually be getting back to computers with our reading articles. I too believe that an educated electorate makes a better country, so hopefully more projects like this will be developed in the future.
ReplyDeleteThis seems like a very cool project, and the goal seems to be a good one, but I would like to see this in action to see if visualization of this data actually provides voters with usable information.
ReplyDeleteI get so perturbed when people say we have a democracy because what we really have is a republic with indirect representation which is why if I vote to put someone up there to speak on my behalf, they better do their job. This tool helps keep tabs on politicians to see who they have in their best interests.
ReplyDeleteBeing the history buff I am, I really enjoyed this concept
ReplyDelete