[consulting] Legislative Bill Tracking with Drupal

[Greg Knaddison - GVS]

On 5/9/06, Moshe Weitzman <weitzman at tejasa.com> wrote:
> I would make the bill a node, each legislator a user, and the votes will be
> vote up/vote down or rsvp or similar. See
> http://drupal.org/project/voteupdown. You might provide a 'switch user'
> block for the admins to switch and record a new vote. Or just do some excel
> import.

Yeah Moshe's idea seems pretty good - the big question in my mind is
what the source of the vote data will be and how you want to display
it.  If you've got it in CSV or some spreadsheet format, then a script
to import it seems important (and pretty custom).  If you're going to
do it manually...yikes.  As to displaying the data, I assume
voteupdown gives some facility for viewing the votes, but you may also
need to write your own extensions to it to get the displays in a
manner that you would like.

I could also see the importance of creating some taxonomy terms to
associate with the node or some custom fields in the node (using e.g.
CCK or flexinode).  These would be useful for tracking how a
particular bill ranks in various categories like environmentalism, the
opinion of the sierra club, the opinion of affected employers, the
opinion of various thinktanks, etc.  Then  you would have some fun
creating reports by legislator and by these other elements to be able
to see how consistently a legislator votes with these elements.

Greg

--
Greg Knaddison | Growing Venture Solutions
Denver, CO | http://growingventuresolutions.com
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