Civic Mirror Walkthrough

1. A scroll that displays the bills trending nationally. All states and territories, a trending bill scroll, and links to the LegisSwipe (Tinder, for legislation) game, donate button, sign in, and very messy/broken find my ballot page.

2. Individual state or territory landing page.

3. "Just the facts" "Conservative" "Progressive" summaries of each bill you can toggle.

3. "Just the facts" "Conservative" "Progressive" summaries of each bill you can toggle.

3. "Just the facts" "Conservative" "Progressive" summaries of each bill you can toggle.

1. You can voice your support or opposition for the bill with one-click email. 2. A summary of the bill is provided. 3. All sponsors/co-sponsors will be listed

4. You can toggle the description of the bill to show a "just the facts" "conservative" or "progressive" take.

1. Collapsed power-level sort of elected officials, state-wide until county is selected from dropdown menu. All officials will display at state level when a row is toggled open. 2. Statistics drawn from studies used in pending or passed legislation. 3. Recently passed legislation 4. Youtube, Tiktok, Instagram videos pertaining to Indiana

5. Toggles the evidence and whether an official has any that's been tagged as "good" "bad" "questionable" or "neutral." Editorial tags by default. Your individual tags with profile creation. 6. Clicking counties will populate county-specific videos. You can "tour" a state and/or tune into local news/content creators. 7. This calendar attempts to combine every county, library, facebook, or state/county-event calendar into one place so you can see quickly what's happening around you, remotely, or how you might get involved or inspired by others.

1. You can quickly modify information, ask an official a question, learn about challengers, or read/watch information to quickly get familiar with different candidates or identify where more information should be sought out.

2. County specific calendar you can sort by different types of events or upload yours to through mobile upload interface. 3. Very in-progress attempt to make big non-specific topics locally actionable/understandable. Contain long detailed descriptions as well as step-by-step instructions.

3. With "cand" toggled, lists of challengers appear on left. Challengers on right persist when "cand" disabled.*

4. Mouse over a seat name and get a description of what they are responsible for (I want this to eventually be hyper-specific to an area's needs/history/news)

5. If we have their email, "ama" shows up next to them. Perhaps you've reviewed the budget and wanted to ask Pete why $954,00 is unitemized "other".

6. You can use pre-populated messages for initial outreach, or type your own, but the system sends an email (if you have a profile) at your point of contact with the information you're curious about.

You can get a quick visual impression of whether there's any evidence about someone, whether it was auto-bot found or human-tagged. Most small-town officials have little to nothing, or only budget information if it's been found and uploaded. A half light-blue/half blue node might be a budget and an article announcing that the official won their election, for example. I uploaded the budget info, the auto-bot found an article that matched the person. "2" count of evidence.

1. Mike Braun has 7 bad pieces of evidence, 1 questionable, and 512 "neutral" almost-all certainly auto-found and often redundant (thing to fix/condense in Ground-News-esc way).

2. If you click Mike Braun's name, a date-sorted scroll of all his evidence appears to the right. You can read quotes you've tagged from articles, summaries, messy (needs cleaning) auto-found articles, or links to things that can't be opened on site (sometimes videos break or get blocked.)

4. If there's a lot and you don't want to search/scroll that way, toggle "tip" and "TV" and every time you mouse-over his name, a new video from his evidence queue will populate.* You can navigate to it directly, or opt for quick previews.

Legislators will have 4 (or 5) buttons to press to sort between their evidence queues, research panes, socials, and bill panes. [3 depicted here as known glitch sometimes] If you've reached out to them, and/or if they respond, and you send that exchange to [email protected], the 5th panel with (your email-redacted) exchange will appear.

"Mark Spencer" is a super common name, so our researcher is struggling to find information on him with the defaults. It can be trained. 3. You can drop a copied article from another website here (say you've paid/subscribed), or the URL to see if it will parse/populate.

4. At the top, an article that's been URL dropped. Then displayed below in the right panel. 4a. This feed is (working to be) hyper-local to better source actual local news about local officials. It's meant to be more capable/specific to the areas/offices than a general search engine search, hopefully surfacing local outlets or inviting local resources to plug their RSS feeds in.

5. You can highlight, right click, and quote what you want from articles. You can quickly read/reference "good" or "bad" or "questionable" things and/or send the article to populate as evidence under other named officials.

6. As you research/build profiles on people, you can toggle seeing how you've tagged the information, or how the editorial team has decided to tag it

Around where the arrow is pointing (used to, think it broke) be a list of any co-sponsors as well as an ability to one-click email your support or opposition for the bill. (in progress to fix)

1. Bill ratings appear separate from the evidence feed (not sure if it must or another bug) 2. Full content from bills can also be quoted/tagged and should appear in evidence queue (also broken right now, but probably easy fix) 3. Anything from "social media" (see next slide) uploaded from the mobile uploader.

Took a screenshot, clicked "socials" in the mobile uploader because it was from facebook. Searched/tagged the official and hit "drop screenshot."

Helps keep the social media riff-riff separate from the legislation and separate from the actual reporters 4. If I click their name I get the page below

This is wholly undeveloped and currently reproduces the evidence queue. I want it to be a standardized Q/A form that can be referenced to see how politically aligned you may be given their answers or votes. Think OKCupid and a "with us/against us" Rolling Stone scale visualizer. I'd also like this to be a place where the electeds and/or candidates can mirror their websites or find other (maybe paid) functionality they can't get elsewhere related to campaign data or research.

Any community that live-streams their meetings should have a youtube stream running here when it's live. (limited testing of this, but it's showed up in some places). Calendars are simple, right? It might be cool to upgrade it with specific agendas/campaigns in the future.

The Indiana State Calendar is really hundreds if not over a thousand calendars. It highlights the county of the event you click (if you click the county it's still sourcing local videos from the main page below the events.

A list of events should parse (this breaks a lot lately) and give you a preview of the dates/locations/county and description of events to approve all at once or go in an make changes.

1. "Spines" of actionable topics like requesting records, organizing a recall, or getting garbage picked up. 2. County-relevant subjects. This was my first attempt at compiling information relevant to a specific area. The information contained will likely be spread out/displayed in different spots than the kind of arbitrary placement now. 3. Experimental idea where you could free-form complain and potentially get matched to an existing open issue or organizer around your concerns.

My car was recently illegally searched in Shererville by one of their officers and a St. John P.D. one/his dog. This sent me on a weeks long learning experience about how to get their body cams, reports, and other information related to the stop. I'm currently fighting (building) a bot that's trying to centralize and explain the process in a way their websites often don't from any/all departments. Some don't seem to have their forms online, but might have portals or instructions, like Griffith. (all needs to be human-verified at this stage)

Other departments, like St. John have their form online, or I obtained it via email, and then had each box that needs filled get reproduced.

What you fill in the top uses their actual form where it fills in your details.

It gives you costs, options to print/save, or email it straight away. I want to make it a regular occurrence to be able to interact, inquire, and oversee the powers that be.

Isn't this sad/ridiculous? Who do I need to vote for that would give us this power to better be of consequence to our negligent government? Let's get that Indiana Code amended, shall we?

If you click "data centers" you get 2 nodes, a history, a summary, names and numbers, and an empty "recent actions taken" panel. The nodes are supposed to show you the chain of responsibility tied to the issue of data centers. It's ugly, not intuitive, and the names/numbers feel arbitrary. The concise punchy paragraphs help highlight the absurdity though.

At first pass, AI drew up incredibly long, detailed, sourced information about the data centers in Lake County. Nerds like me can read all the gritty details, highlight a section, and create a concern that can be directly emailed to the relevant parties. (in theory, this system isn't built out properly yet).

This is the closest of what I hoped would be presented to a person looking to be directly civically engaged in something straight forward like trash clean up. I want instructions like this to accompany the "spines" of issues or steps of paperwork to follow. I want to make the systems and processes feel alive for people who've only otherwise felt stuck bearing witness or like it's too much work and confusion to figure something out.

This is "best" visual depiction of what I call the 100 "in progress" or "could be better" aspects of the site I don't have the time/knowledge to figure out alone anymore.

I try to trap the AI into discreet accomplish-able goals in specific domains so I can better identify how they might need to be broken down further.

If we're always being listened to and our conversations sliced up and sold, I want the world of news/podcasts/information that's politically and socially relevant to be sort to who said it, who it's about, and whether it was right or wrong.

This is all stuff I've had to wholly trust to the AI's explanation/fixes and where I feel an expert would be useful.

I think you need to capitalize on people's quick incensed intention by pointing towards who's responsible in the moment people learn just who that is.

I think a thousand points of data can be distilled down into a compelling story, metaphor, or by-the-numbers comparison to make it feel real and of consequence.

I want to be a factory for these kinds of visualizations and how they apply to individual cities, pieces of legislation, and net work broadly: https://whatdoesonebilliondollarslooklike.website/