A tasty recipe for a healthy democracy
(See Part 1: An introduction to Digital Democracy)
I’m sure you know of some dishes that are delicious — and healthy too, right? I have a tremendous gazpacho recipe. And I love Veracruz-style red snapper. Maybe it’s the jalapeno in both that make these veggies pop.
Anyway, what does that have to do with politics and our new Digital Democracy project? It’s actually the perfect metaphor because Digital Democracy gives you all of the essential ingredients for a healthy democracy, but unless the recipe is good, it will feel like reading a dictionary. Fact-filled and chewy, perhaps, but not fun.
So this post is about our thoughts as we worked to design a website about California’s state Legislature that is interesting, intuitive, appealing and maybe even a little fun. It’s not easy. Digital Democracy is an unprecedented database of state government information. We can bury you in data. You can see more at our earlier post, but essentially Digital Democracy captures every word uttered in a public meeting, every dollar given to a politician, every vote cast, every bill introduced, every supporter and opponent and lobbyist and much more. The data will be accessible in three ways: (1) you can search it yourself, (2) artificial intelligence scans it to generate story ideas for reporters and (3) it displays on the website an empirical, non-partisan look at legislators and how their decisions are made.
I’ll share a later post about the AI and story tips for reporters. And, as we get closer to our launch in January, I’ll share a primer about how to search the database yourself. Meanwhile, here are some thoughts about our recipe for the Digital Democracy website, which is being built by the global development firm, 10up.
Our first assumption is that there are two primary reasons someone will visit Digital Democracy. One, they want to know more about a legislator or the legislator representing them. And two, they are interested in a topic, like education or the environment, and they want to know the latest about what the state is doing on that issue.
Another assumption is that 80% of the people who visit Digital Democracy will probably only want 20% of the enormous amount of information in this database. So let’s think about what they are looking for and how to present it in a way that is interesting and simple. And still provide free, public access to all of the data we have.
To introduce the legislators, we’re building a page for each of the 80 members in the Assembly and 40 members in the Senate. We want the page to be attractive, so the first impression does not look like a page for expert insiders. One way we did that was to put a photo from the legislator’s district atop each page. California legislators represent all kinds of places, of course, so there are photos of coastal surf, snow-capped mountains, highways, neighborhoods, farms and vineyards. Among the other features on each legislator’s page:
- The top will feature stories written by CalMatters or our media partners about this legislator.
- We picked three categories of information about each legislator: politics, policy and personal. Quick data visualizations score a legislator from liberal to conservative, report how many bills they introduce and pass, and track how much money they raise compared to others.
- We wrote short bios for each of the 120 legislators. We could have done this with bots, but (thankfully?) their prose is still pretty clunky. So we lightened up the writing by doing them ourselves.
- Legislators get a badge if they are in a leadership position or if our reporters identify them as key players on a major state issue.
- Scrolling down the page peels the onion a little more with a closer look at the money going to legislators from different sources to help them get elected (direct campaign donations, party donations, independent expenditure committees) or perhaps to influence their decisions (gifts, travel and behests).
- Other sections display all of their bills and committee assignments, their ratings by key interest groups, links to their comments in public hearings and a look at their district with a map, election results, demographic information and voter registration.
For those coming to Digital Democracy to learn about a state topic, we designed pages intended to show the latest California agenda for six major issues: education, health, environment, justice, housing and poverty. Each topic page will have:
- An introduction written by our beat reporters about what is expected in the coming year.
- All of the current bills related to that topic, with the top ones highlighted and analyzed by our beat reporters. Each links to a separate page for each bill that offers a deep look including quick links to every discussion about the bill.
- A list of key players on the topic, some chosen by our beat reporters and some identified by the data about their activity in hearings or in taking positions on related bills.
- Links to the “explainers” that CalMatters offers on a variety of state policy questions, like “What is the cap-and-trade system?” or “Why are houses so expensive?”
- Every story by CalMatters on the issue.
Finally, for those who want to geek out, Digital Democracy will automatically create a web page for every hearing that gives easy access to the agenda, transcript, video and background on each bill discussed. You can jump to any point in the hearing transcript if you’re interested in a particular speaker or bill.
Digital Democracy will also automatically create a web page for every bill that displays votes, status, text, legislative analysis, supporters and opponents, authors and co-authors as well as easy access to video and transcripts every time the bill is mentioned.
Overall, our motivation in building this website is to provide you with a trusted, nonpartisan portal to inform you about the people and policies in state government. And to give you some of the most important tools for civic engagement, whether that is voting, or sharing your opinion or working to make a better state.
We hope this sounds tasty, especially for those working to keep a healthy democracy in California. We gave it a dash of jalapeno. And maybe there’s a good California wine pairing to add a bit more fun.
