Mobilationorator
The goal of this project is to build a software application that educates voters on how political candidates and elected officials relate to current events through an interface built for tablets and mobile phones. By providing an issue-centric interface, we hope to create a more fluid and natural experience where users can quickly open up the application after reading or hearing about a current event (i.e. planned parenthood, student loan forgiveness, social security, marijuana prohibition) in regular news media and immediately have access to data about how potential candidates and officials are involved with the current event.
User Stories
AdamAdam is watching his favorite nightly news broadcast and sees that gay marriage has been legalized at the federal level. He wants quick and easy access to information about his candidates and officials latest actions and statements on the subject.
- Adam already has an opinion on his topic of interest, so he’s looking for like-minded candidates.
- After finding like-minded candidates, he will want some detail in the form of quotes/articles to figure out how polarized like-minded candidates are on the issue.
Betsy
Betsy finds a candidate she likes and wants to learn more about the candidate.
- She can click a link to find out more about the candidate on votesmart.org.
- Betsy also finds that her current representative is doing something she considers foolish, so she wants contact information for that representative.
Charlie
Charlie hasn't been following current events, but is aware of some of the larger topics like gay marriage, marijuana legalization, women's rights, minority rights, etc. and he wants to become an 'informed' voter while eating breakfast on election day.
- Charlie isn’t very interested in most of the popular issues in the media right now, but may be interested in what has been going on in NASA funding
- Charlie looks through the available issues to find Science and Technology and reads what his candidates and representatives have been saying and doing about the issue recently.
- Charlie will spend 15 minutes eating breakfast and dribbling soy milk onto his phone. (http://media.hollywood.com/images/l/charliecereal.jpg)
Dee
Dee gets into an argument with her friends at a bar about Clinton’s position on gay marriage and wants to look it up to prove her friends wrong.
- Dee finds the hot issue of gay marriage in the app
- She can then filter by a specific candidate name instead of by her set location
- She realizes she’s wrong and proceeds to eat drink and smoke her shame away. (https://uproxx.files.wordpress.com/2015/08/cake-dee-always-sunny.gif)
Frank
Frank already knows he wants to vote for the most fiscally conservative candidate on the ballot, but is interested in specifics of what government programs might lose or gain funding.
- He wants to gain a general knowledge of the issue, but he is specifically interested in the candidate’s position on providing funding for Planned Parenthood.
- Frank already knows the name of the candidate he is looking for.
- He then gets hungry and presses the ‘download sandwich’ button. (https://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lz1oe2Ux9M1qc8qobo1_1280.jpg)
Flow Chart

Wireframes



Technical Planning
Framework: Ionic (http://ionicframework.com/)
OSes to Support: iOS, Android, Windows
Backend: APIv2
Todo Per Page
Page 1
Database
Tables need to be created for content curation for the app(and maybe
- featured - title, description, photos in different formats
- featured_tag - featured_id, tag_id
- Featured Issue Summaries Instructions
Admin
Pyadmin should be updated to handle basic CRUD handling for featured* tables.
Page 2
New Postgres view and API endpoint for content list. It should be irrelevant to data type(speech, ratings, bio, etc) and filtered by location, candidate, and/or tags. Performance will be a factor here and we may want to look into better ways of handling this or better storage medium for this. Sphinx may be of help here, maybe even something like mongo, but the less we have to add to our already complicated cluster, the better.
Donation Page
Research needs to be done on how best to implement this and what security precautions need to be taken into account for implementing the entire page on the application. Ben will be doing this and this section will be updated when complete.
Geocoding
Resolving lat+long to Cong and SL districts
Adrian will be looking on ways to source data for this and implementation is up in the air until research is complete. There may be more or less layers to this section depending on the outcome.
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