Show HN: I built a website that simplifies Congress and its activities | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: I built a website that simplifies Congress and its activities

4us.com

96 pointsbbrez133 comments

I'm the Legislative Director for a nonprofit and my first observation of this tool is that I have no clue what it does. I just spent five minutes poking around and it's not obvious what this does, or why I would need it. The map populated with dots that did not seem to have function, and the state issues seemed a little off as most state legislatures are now out of sessions.

How does it compare to the free service GovTrack? What about paid services like CQ, BillTrack, and Politico?

First of all 4us.com is completely free.

We've been working on this site for the last 2 years and have been funding this entirely from our pockets. If you have some free time on your hands please signup to check out some of the stuff you've been missing out.

The basic idea behind 4us is that you can:

- Browse all bills, voting records and members of Congress (kind of what GovTrack does)

- Get notified (email and site notification - facebook style) when there are changes to bills or members of Congress that you follow

- Discuss each bill in the discussion section

- Read simplified bills written by us or the users (that should be nonbiased)

- Join the discussion boards to discuss the latest events and news

- Vote on bills (similar to Countable)

- See how your votes align with what your Representative actually voted (for example if I vote on 10 bills and one of my Senators also voted on those 10 bills, then the site will build an approval rating based on those 10 votes compared. The approval rating or compatibility rating (as we also like to call it) will be on a scale from 0 - 100. The more our votes align the higher the approval rating. Which probably means I should vote for them again. The idea is that when we vote for our new Senators and Representatives we usually just vote based on what others think about them or what we hear in the media. This tool will tell you exactly how you should vote).

What we do is we compare your voting habits to your Congressional Representatives' (you can vote on bills the same way as your senator would) and educate yourself on the laws (we try to make the laws as simple as possible to the everyday citizen - by creating simple videos of the bills, finding and posting short summaries and by enabling discussion in the comment section) that affect us all.

It's the only site out there that will tell you how you actually align with your Reps based on how YOU and THEY feel about important bills. While this is still a long-shot to actually try and see some positive changes.. what we do want to do is help you BE BETTER INFORMED.

Thanks!

have you seen fiscalnote.com ?

Will check it out. Thanks

> - Discuss each bill in the discussion section

> - Join the discussion boards to discuss the latest events and news

> - Vote on bills (similar to Countable)

Based on my experience of other similar sites in other countries, these features will largely be a ghost town. Even if they aren't a ghost town, they can never be representative samples of the US population.

I'd really encourage you to focus on features that are useful even if you only have one user. It's too easy for this sort of site to try to do everything, successful ones tend to be narrowly focused -- I like your notification approach.

Awesome website and idea, I really hope it succeeds. Here are some pointer to perhaps improve it.

- User Angular's ng-cloak to hide your variables while the controller is loading. The {{item.display}} makes the site look amateurish

- Don't do nested left panels. Have the options for bills or representatives on the same page that has the trending bills instead of a second left panel

- The dashboard page tries to show too many things at once. I know you're using an admin bootstrap template and that is not a good choice for what you're trying to do. Try to have the main dashboard page focus on a specific topic (trending stories, users, discussions)

- Hire a UX designer instead of using a generic bootstrap template.

Here are some things that I think you're doing really well:

- The search works really well. Are you using ElasticSearch?

- You're doing a good job of showing what I need to know about a specific bill or a representative. The details pages for bills and representatives are complete and well structured good job!

I think you've built a really worthwhile site. I used it for a bit and got good information from it.

Here are a few things that will help it along. Under the house of reps description there should be more info on the rep's district. Where is/what does "Representative from California 37" mean. Searching by zip code would be good. Switching to a wiki back end might help -that way people can help you update the site. There's just too much info to update for a one person or a small group. Also sign-up should be less emphasized. I know you want to get people involved but these days people get turned off if they have to sigh up for a site without clear benefits. I know you can browse the site but without it but it's not clear from the start.

Good job, much fortune.

Agreed, I love this project I just dislike how data is presented (although it is a nice interface).

As for the "Representative from California 37" this is your voter sub district or whatever user you selected that was on the map, which brings me to my next point.

Although I think this website is good, it doesn't target any specific users. The immediate information presented to the user such as "Representative from California 37" or popular bills is confusing and I'll make the bet that it scares users away (along with the forced signup if you couldn't find /explore). Instead of a catch all landing page I'd make the /explore more user specific.

Let me paint a picture of how I see this: So you already know where the user is from, when I click "representatives" why aren't I brought to a page with MY representatives, instead I'm brought to a page with a list of people who don't represent me. I should note that the individual representative pages are spot on though I like the collection of twitter, sponsored bills, etc. I think that if people are brought to information about their specific representatives that they are more likely to 'care' about whats happening on this site.

Interesting website with the potential to present a lot of information nicely, but I do not see the "simple" part of it. Everything about the UI and even the stat displays seems confusing to me. Why do I have a 0% compatibility rating with all of my local representatives, who I actually sort of like? I am sure I am misinterpreting these things, but there is no context. Mouse-over explanations for every single datum? Simple to me means about 1/3 as complicated as the site currently is.

Another problem is bill names tells us nothing about what is actually in the bill. How about sorting them based on who sponsored and voted for them? Then we can see highly partisan bills and bills that actually cross the aisle a little. That'd be interesting.

Anyway, I hope some of that is useful. Overall though it is a great "Show HN" site.

Forcing a user to sign up before they've seen the content is a big miss. Strongly suggest you rearchitect this and offer sign up once users want to save progress/sign up for notifications.

https://4us.com/Explore

Seems like I can access the content there just fine?

This is a great site. I don't mind setting up an account. It was easy enough to link to my Google account and set a less random username. I gave it my address and it linked me to my local elected officials. I went to the bill section and started reading. I have voted on 4 bills. It works better than yelling at the darkness, which is what I was doing before. I thought the gamification angle was pointless but then I earned some points for voting and now I want to be president...

A similar service exists for Members of Parliament in the United Kingdom, for those interested: https://www.theyworkforyou.com

I'm trying to find a differentiating factor... it would be really cool if it could somehow intelligently parse the contents of Bills to provide a more useful summary.

For example, the summary of HR 5538[0] offers me no insight as to why the vote was such a party split (Dems against, Reps for). So I started reading the actual bill text, and then gave up because it's long and I have things to do...

0: https://4us.com/Bills/Details/h-r-5538_congress114

You’re assuming that any of the voters actually read it. They don’t have time either. The real reason they voted the way they did is probably that somebody else told them to.

Sections 431 and 436 are probably some of the key sticking points.

The problem is that you really do need humans with domain experience to explain exactly what a bill will actually do in practice, which is why lobbyists and stakeholders will spend tens of thousands of dollars on niche publications and legislative action services. Technology can make analysis easier, but I think we're a long way from replacing analysts with NLP in this area.

Newspapers used to do this and it was wildly popular, but very labor intensive.

> lobbyists and stakeholders will spend tens of thousands of dollars on niche publications and legislative action services.

There's better value for money in lobbyists drafting the legislation language themselves and contributing to an official's superPAC so they'll drop it into a bill.

I can see the value in the organization of these activities. But without some kind of manual curation into "layman" categories or translations of what these activities are, it's still difficult for me to interpret.

Love this. I wanted to build this exact thing a few years ago. Did a little work on it and then saw a squirrel and jumped to the next new shiny thing I saw. Really happy to see that someone else had the same thought and executed it much better than I ever could have hoped to.

What is the target demographic?

IMO the UI is too complicated for someone who isn't really dedicated to doing research. Seems like a great research tool for someone who wants to dedicate time to it, but I am unclear if that is the target.

If you're trying to reach the average voter, the UI has to be devastatingly simple - like , no possibility of them putting any real effort in simple.

Why do I have to sign up to use it at all? You want people to get involved in the process but you add friction. My guess is, your bounce rate is high.

I'm sure there are plenty of features that require an account - but I'd imagine there are still ways of displaying and sharing the public information you've gathered within your tool without getting people to give you their e-mail address and generate yet another password.

Just think about it - the landing page should say something like "check the voting record of your senator against what you believe in. click your state." - and then show a map.

With this - you'd at least get ONE click. My guess is now, you miss out a lot because you want people to buy into what you're building without providing ANY value other than "feel good to change government" which as we all know isn't enough to get people to care.

Actually you can browse the site fully without ever logging in.

Same as with other social sites. You will be able to freely browse it without logging in but taking any action will require you to create an account. You'll be able to find all the bills, reps, comments by users, etc. You only have to signup if you want to follow bills (get updates when they change) or reps (when they sponsor new bills), vote on bills and build your approval rating.

It might be a bit unclear but the top navigation bar will help you browse through the site. Example link for bills https://4us.com/Bills

We just wanted to have the homepage as a landing page and list what the site does.

I think the problem is the "Get Started" button leads directly to a sign up page.

I'd find it more useful if it used my geolocation to go straight to my representatives. After getting engaged and wanting to follow them, I would then be more inclined to sign up in order to follow updates.

Yes I was a little put off by getting asked for that directly

Would be nice if the front page had some more info about what you are trying to do and how why I want to use it (What's in it for me). There is more text explaining the site in the comments thread that I could find on the site.

Would like to have my view of Congress simplified.

I followed H.R. 1301 and your site doesn't have that it passed or what the bill is about. On top of that you have this scary picture of multiple huge dish antennas. I was a home owner and the ham next to me said "Hey, go look up H.R. 1301" and I saw that picture I'd be in a full panic.

Good luck, I bookmarked it, I'll come back and see if things are any better in a few weeks.

I bounced the minute I saw the signup form. Why do we have to sign up for this? :(

[copy pasting this comment from my other reply]

Actually you can browse the site fully without ever logging in.

It might be a bit unclear but the top navigation bar will help you browse through the site. Example link for bills https://4us.com/Bills

We just wanted to have the homepage as a landing page and list what the site does.

I'd prefer to see on the first page exactly what the offer is as a live page, vs some text that explains it and asks for a sign up.

For a while I really expected the website to be just a picture of some mess or stupid thing.

Is it 4us.com or 4usxus.com? You need to get this straightened out.

Nice work. But unfortunately in the "post factual" world this will be of use to a few people. People care about noise, not facts anymore.

Where do you get the data from?

Can't speak for the author of this site, but all of the information I've seen on it is freely available on congress.gov or gpo.gov.

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