My development team at Phonebank.org has been playing around with
DemocracyMaps for about a week. We currently use Open Congress and Open
States.
We ran into a bit of brick wall and were hoping to get either updates in
the API itself, or feedback from the community about a possible solution.
Essentially we want to run a query/call to return something like, "all MA
Senators," or "return all elected officials in X state." With 100k
contacts possibly piping into an interface (we want to let people
micro-target every universe), there are a lot of issues if we can't break
up our calls into more manageable chunks of data.
Also, if someone is entering their zip code through the interface, we want
to be able to deliver them results of people who aren't their
representatives (while prioritizing their own elected officials).
Essentially, if there is an advocacy effort being targeted to the top 5
members of the Senate Foreign Relations committee, or some other
micro-universe, we want ALL of our users to be able to interact with the
campaign. Not just people who happen to be represented by the random
elected officials. This type of targeting becomes even more important when
you get to a local level and suddenly a State Legislative campaign goes
from having 300 targets to just 1 target for a user -- which essentially
makes it useless for targeted phone banks.
Does anyone have any thoughts or ideas about how we may be able to
accomplish some or all of those goals? I'm more than happy to get into
more detail if that would help.
Thanks for everyone's work!
-Zach