

Ask HN: Rate my startup: openpoll.us - maresca

openpoll is a pure electronic democracy.  It will help keep a watchful eye on politicians and be an excellent source of public opinion on the laws that govern America.  I have been working on this project for the better part of the past 3 years, and would appreciate it if you guys would take a look.  ALL feedback is encouraged and appreciated.  Thanks.<p>https://openpoll.us
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kongqiu
Really cool idea to open this data up to the masses.

A few ideas:

 _Maybe you could do some sort of "introduction" video or tutorial so that a
new visitor can tell what the site is about, use cases, where to find help,
etc.

_ Could you maybe create a master list of "issue" keywords and then scrape the
legislative text for these keywords, and then use this to tag each bill? Tags
would help with discovery.

*Similarly, scraping the data for Legislator names would also be interesting.

~~~
maresca
I am working on creating a good landing page right now.

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bigsassy
I'm all for open government data. You may want to take a look at Sunlight
Foundation's various projects:

<http://sunlightlabs.com/projects/>

And have you seen Open Congress yet?

<http://opencongress.org/>

~~~
maresca
Both really good sites. Sunlight labs has a great API for state data. They
don't have every state nailed down yet, but still a very good amount of data.
All of their stuff is in python, but I'm a .NET guy, so I did everything in
C#.

opencongress is a good site. Sites like those need more exposure to the
general public.

Other honorable mentions:

<http://www.govit.com/>

<http://www.mygov365.com/>

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maresca
Clickable: <https://openpoll.us>

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dreamdu5t
You need far better UI and design. You _need_ it.

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jcol
You should probably seed some interesting political discussions to get the
comments going. I'm surprised it took you 3 years to build this-- it could
have been done in a weekend and with a much better UI.

~~~
maresca
Where do you suppose one gets all of the legislative data to a site like this?
Saying this can be done in a weekend is a huge underestimation.

~~~
jcol
They are all on the web (such as
<http://www.njleg.state.nj.us/bills/bills0001.asp>) - I would just create a
bot to scrape the content automatically.

I hope you didn't do it manually...

EDIT: Also, the amount you have may not be necessary. It just makes your site
look dead when you have 350 pages of legislative bills with no comment
activity or voting activity. You would have been better off starting with just
a few and building it up from there. Personally, I would have done medical
marijuana bills because everyone has something to say about that.

~~~
maresca
That's exactly what I did. I created bots for every single state. I wanted to
scrape as much data as possible so I went for all the data available that
every state had. Writing each bot took only a day or two, but running them
took much longer. I also did all of this in my spare time on top of a full
time job. If I worked on it full time, I probably could have done it in 6
months.

~~~
utnick
I think your site needs some work, both the design and the chicken and egg
participation problem. However obviously there is some value in having
scrapers for every state legislature. Maybe you should pivot and become an api
provider for this info?

~~~
maresca
Good point. I will definitely be providing an API at some point, and will also
open source everything after some independent code reviews. The design was an
afterthought. I spent so long gathering data that that was my main focus. Now
that I am done, I can really focus on marketing and design.

