Ask Your Lawmaker
Front Page
Website: Ask Your Lawmaker
Client: Capitol News Connection
Dates: August 2007 through January 2008
Scope: 250 developer hours
Description: Capitol News Connection (CNC) is a small non-profit news organization based in Washington DC. Reporters for CNC regularly author stories and produce audio content that is heard by millions of people spread across over two hundred public radio stations. With the support of a grant from the Sunlight Foundation, CNC launched the “Ask Your Lawmaker” (AYL) website as a way to solicit questions from individual citizens which are filtered and then asked of members of Congress by CNC reporters who record and post the answer.
Chapter Three was referred to the project by another proprietor of Drupal Magic and was drawn AYL’s to the social mission of providing more openness and access to political leaders. Since CNC was new to using the Internet to distribute their content there was a lot of client “hand holding”, but a combination of our iterative design process and Drupal’s ability to quickly prototype possible functionality allowed for the consideration and review of multiple different strategies and designs.
To help publicize and promote the project, CNC and Chapter Three helped to develop a number of strategies to “virally” spread the site’s content on the website. The centerpiece of this effort was the development of a Flash-based “Widget” that displays questions and answers from the site according to a number of configurable category and sorting options. Additionally, site audio content is distributed through a regularly updated Podcast stream and individual questions and answers come with embeddable HTML code for bloggers and others to post on their own sites.
Features:
- User Generated Content: The ability of users to submit questions for lawmakers lies at the heart of the sites functionality and Chapter Three developed a streamlined registration process and a helpful “Ask a Question” form to encourage users to submit their questions.
- User Voting: To help aggregate individual voices, Chapter Three implemented a voting system that allowed users to vote on questions they supporte and have those votes reflected in the ordering and position of questions on the site.
- Flash Widget: To help promote the “virality” of the site, Chapter Three developed a customizable widget to distribute questions and answers on third party websites.
- Audio Integration and Podcasting: Since CNC records the actual lawmaker’s answer to each question, a Flash based audio playback system was developed to replay those answers.
- Complex Data Model: A customized data storage system was developed to support storing and managing metadata for individual questions, along with information about the user who submitted them, the details about the lawmaker for whom the question was asked, and information about the answer with an associated audio file.
