On the listing of all candidates, we show David Saline having a current balance of $0.00

But on his detail page, https://nmid.datamade.us/candidates/david-saline-3163/

He has 84 dollars in his net funds.

It appears you're linking to a search of people when i click on a treasurer but with Thomas Lawley of CVNM Verde Voters Fund it doesn't show any treasurer things for him.

Same with other treasurer's clicked on for PAC. Some clicking reveals it's just a problem with them, it appears, not with candidate treasurers.

Turn on caching for 💯 performance!!!!

It looks like the "contact type" table has some interesting information about what kind of organization is giving money to a candidate or committee or where the candidate or committee is spending money. It might be cool to show totals by election cycle for each of these organization types in a chart on the detail pages. The types that we have are:

State Party Committee
Legislative District Party Committee
Financial Institution
Minor Party Committee
Food/Catering Services
Business
Telecommunication
Office Supplies
Other
County Party Committee
Political Action Committee
Individual
Professional Services
Advertising
Legal
Native American Tribe
Union

We should have a view of people who are actively running for office right now. Relates to #56

IndexView – with its plethora of queries – loads slowly. Do some caching?

let's rank each candidate and committee by the amount of money they have on hand. this should be calculated during the ETL update and stored in the database.

Let's setup an FTP server for the NM Secretary of State to upload their data.

Create static CMS placeholders for the following sections:

Static pages

• about

Home page

• intro text
• top earners (requires #61)
• largest donations
• top candidates
• top committees

Other pages

• candidates
• committees

Related to #42

Things that we should get:

• District table (I'm guessing this is the district for which the candidate is running)
• County table
• Contact table (This is referred to from the Candidate and PAC tables so I'm guessing it's the contact person)
• Treasurer table (This is referred to from the PAC and Campaign tables so is probably the treasurer that is listed on the filings)
• Political Party table
• Address table
• A mysterious table that I think is probably just called Status. There are several tables which record some kind of status. This ranges from just "status" to "primary election winner status" and "transaction status". I'm not sure if all these values are stored in one table but that's what it seems like. If nothing else, it'd be nice to know what those status IDs refer to.
• Election Season table. (This is referred to from the campaign table and might have information about which election the campaign is active for. This will make it possible to line up races between candidates, etc and make it possible to group things for a given election season)

Things that would be nice to have:

• Division table (perhaps another geography? Not really sure)
• Filing type table (This is referred to from the filing period table and might have info about the kinds of filings that they get)

Other tables that seem to exist but we don't have:

• Regular filing period table (This is referred to from the filing period table. Not sure what it refers to)
• Entity table (This may or may not exist. It seems like this is a unique ID that is unique across PACs, Candidates and Campaigns and allows for joining tables that have info about all three kinds of "entities". It might be cool to see what's in there, though, if they do have that table)

CSV downloads should be made available for

• all donations & expenditures
• committee & candidate views
• search result views

Framing / Call to Action

• Make sure that the site has a clear call to action. This should not be 'hey look at this cool tool'. Rather, it should be a way for someone to engage in a meaningful way on the issue being presented.

Some examples:

• Join a mailing list (which means you need to create one)
• Attend an event
• Share on Facebook/Twitter
• Donate to a particular organization
• Create a Tumblr for people to share interesting findings (if it's a data access site)

Web Search Indexing

• If you have a staging site, tell the search engine robots not to index you with a robots.txt
• Make sure you allow indexing when you are ready to launch.

Google Analytics

• Create Google Analytics account
• Hook up the GA Tracking Code (typically in our analytics_lib.js file)
• Set up relevant Goals and Funnels
• Set up Google Webmaster Tools
• Verify site in Webmaster Tools with DNS TXT record
• Link Webmaster Tools to Google Analytics

Sharing & Rich Snippets

• Set up general meta tags
  • <meta name=“description”>
  • <meta name=“author”>
• Set up Facebook meta tags & validate here
  • <meta property=“og:site_name”>
  • <meta property=“og:title”>
  • <meta property=“og:type”>
  • <meta property=“og:description”>
  • <meta property=“og:url”>
  • <meta property=“og:image”>
• Set up Twitter meta tags & validate here
  • <meta name=“twitter:card”>
  • <meta name=“twitter:site”>
  • <meta name=“twitter:creator”>
  • <meta name=“twitter:description”> (note that this needs to be under 200 characters)
  • <meta name=“twitter:title”>
  • <meta name=“twitter:url”>
  • <meta name=“twitter:image:src”>
• Create 2-5 meme images using Canva or a similar tool

Mobile Friendliness

Test on various mobile devices:

• scrolling is easy
• nav bar works
• hoverable things are tappable
• charts/maps look ok

Page Speed

• run the site through https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/

Miscellaneous Polish

• add favicons, apple touch icons (http://www.favicomatic.com/)
• add 404 & 500 error pages

Load Testing

If your site relies on a database or server-side code, it should use caching and be load tested. If it's a static HTML or Jekyll site, you can skip this section.

• set up page caching
• write a script to load test all your pages. Here's a good example from Illinois Sunshine

Testing

• Plan for a day of bugfixing. This day should happen after you have added the last features you plan on adding.

GitHub Readme

If the site is open source, make sure the Readme.md is complete and accurate.

• open source this repo

Here's a few good examples:

• Geomancer
• Illinois Sunshine

The Readme should have the following sections:

• Overview
• Setup
• Running locally
• Team
• Errors / Bugs
• Pull Requests
• Copyright and License

Outreach

• Write up press release
• Identify who will be the primary person of contact and make their info prominent on the website and all PR
• Identify relevant media contacts to email
• Identify relevant social news sites (reddit, listservs, slack channels)
• Divide & conquer - send out the media blitz!

The current home page is pretty simple and lifeless and also derivative of Illinois Sunshine.

I'd like to try out adding an image with some text on the home page similar to https://chicago.councilmatic.org/

Here's a few good pictures I've found of the NM State Capitol:

• https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c8/NewMexicoCapitolSantaFe.jpg
• http://static.squarespace.com/static/539f6733e4b0b7f569f40f46/53ab1ec4e4b05cda57b01697/53ab1edde4b05cda57b01873/1403723633624/nm-state-capitol-cbarronjr-.jpg

https://nmid.datamade.us/committees/patriot-majority-new-mexico-412/

Seems related to changes we made in how we handled debt.

Home page has been stubbed out with the following sections:

• Search form
• Largest donations in the last 90 days
• Top candidates
• Top Committees
• About

Any others we should add?

These pages seem to be very similar, despite being about different things.

Currently, the only difference I can see between them is the candidate page has a separate list of offices the person has run for. If this is the case, it would be much more DRY to merge these templates into one.

It would seem that anything before 2010 is not reliable. Let's hide it.

See https://nmid.datamade.us/candidates/stephen-french-3699/

Relates to #34

It looks like we need to do some recoding of the variables in the election results table to make them human readable:

For example: https://nmid.datamade.us/candidates/maggie-stebbins-2386/

What does 3 and 1 mean?

I'm working on a feature branch to get this going here. We can trigger deploys whenever we push a tag that way.

Related to #29

clicking on this about link instead gets to a donations page
also wondering if there should be links to donors on the donations page, since there are links on candidate and PAC pages?

Create an enhanced about page that's more FAQ like.

Fish created here

Still needs editing/approval by Trip and Marjorie, suggestions welcome from Datamade folk

For many candidates we have the full history of the campaign contributions. When have this, let's start the net funds from 0 instead of after their first filing.

Here's an example of campaign where we see the first filing. https://nmid.datamade.us/candidates/sarah-maestas-barnes-3080/

Not exactly sure where the 0 should be place on the timeline. Some options

• The 0 should be placed at the beginning of the filing period of the first recorded filing. Ms. Barnes first report was probably a biannual report made in April 2014, so start put the 0 at October 2013
• If there is any filing for the creation of the campaign committee, use that.
• Date of first recorded contribution

When i'm looking at Gov. Martinez's page, the top donors for 2014 are ranked (the first year she had donation limits). But if click on largest donations, it gets those big $200K things from 2010. It seems like they should be in the top 25?

Lets add a new website section and on the home page for top earners, modeled on http://www.illinoissunshine.org/top-earners/

Create a widget for top earners (both candidates and committees) in the last 90 days.

We might want to filter out contact information that are from out of date campaigns

For example, Brian Morris shows three times on this Maggie Stebbins page:

https://nmid.datamade.us/candidates/maggie-stebbins-2386/

The listing that we are calling candidates are not really candidates, because we are listing lots of people who are not running for anything, right now. This should be called something like "Politicians" instead.

Since it is possible for a candidate to have more than one active committee at a time, let's make sure that we show all of the relevant latest filings. To accomplish this we'll:

If there is more than one filing for the most recent reporting period, show all of them.
Also show the most recent report for all non-final committees.

NM's Future Leaders is shown with a $149.26 balance here but a zero balance here
same with this PAC
PAC West
this guy
this group

anyway if you want a longer list i can do that - i suspect it's something to do with substituting the total expenditures for closing balance when the latter is 0, though it doesn't appear to be the case with all the 0 balance committees.

Public Election Fund and New Mexico Department of Finance indicate public financing. These and entries like them should be removed from the top donations page on the home page.

Ranking these donations for arbitrary time windows doesn't make a lot of sense. I think we should hide them.

Let's use this: https://github.com/datamade/django-councilmatic/blob/master/councilmatic_core/templates/partials/seo.html

here

at /donations we should show a list of donations, reported in chronological order similar to http://illinoissunshine.org/donations/

Looking at an older, closed PAC and when i click on largest or all donations getting a spinning wheel. There are no donations shown under the top 25, either, so presumably all donations are pre-2010? Same goes for some other old committees.

I'm going to start with just implementing the things that we had for Illinois Sunshine. If there are any new things that we want to add or old things to modify, lets discuss.

Leaving this here to remind me to do that so that the whole deployment pipeline will work.

We are showing Mr. Martinez as having an opening balance of $0.00

https://nmid.datamade.us/candidates/richard-martinez-1349/

This seems to be contradicted by the visualisations.

Same for Mr. Balderas.

Site looks pretty bad on phone

This campaign has information from before 2010

https://nmid.datamade.us/committees/albuquerque-teachers-federation-93/

This pre-2010 info should be excluded, right?

• The hover should just on the center of a period
• The tooltip should show the entire amount of donations and expenditures in the period (We will need to kind of fudge this when there are overlapping reporting periods.

On a few pages I've checked, including https://nmid.datamade.us/candidates/hector-balderas-3046/

Doesn't seem to be working for

• largest donations
• largest expenditures
• all donations
• all expenditures

Name: Firefox
Version: 48.0
Build ID: 20160728203720
User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:48.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/48.0
OS: Linux 4.4.0-36-generic x86-64
Multiprocess Windows: 0/2 (Disabled by add-ons)
Safe Mode: false

If the last filing is a "final filing", I think that's a good indicator that the the candidate/pac does not have any active committees.

Maybe we want to surface this?

• Are there unique identifiers for candidates or committees?
• Are there unique identifiers for transactions?
• Is there candidate committee information? (the contributions appear to be just made directly to candidates but if you look at the more detailed reports, it's clear that, at least sometimes, they are actually going through a committee) (Answer from @sandrafish: i think there are committee names but they list the candidate stuff by candidates - some candidates also have PACs, which are listed under PAC filings)
• What about inter-committee transfers?
• If a candidate makes a mistake and files an amended report, how is that reflected in the data? (Answer from @sandrafish: we should double check with them, but my understanding is that the old data is replaced with the new - there is no indication on what they’re giving us) Discovery from @evz It appears that corrected entries are just appended to the listing of transactions. This means that, if the update is made to a field that we are using to figure out if a record is unique, we'll end up with a duplicate entry. The way this was handled in Illinois is that the entire filing was repeated even if a single correction was made someplace. This added a lot of records that we basically duplicates but it made finding corrections a bit more straightforward.
• Is there a notion of "filing period" reflected in the data but no notion of a filing with things like beginning and ending balance, debts, investments, etc. (Answer from @sandrafish We need to ask if they could include that in a separate download - it IS included on individual PDFs, but the cash on hand is only available there that i can tell - and the totals that are listed on pages like this one are often incorrect - they sometimes appear not to include in-kind, for example)
• What about committee officers and other information about committees (address, supported candidate(s), etc)? (Answer from @sandrafish i believe they fill out paper forms to create the committee, tho they could be digital - they are not located only. the PDFs include info about committee treasurers)
• Is additional information about candidates downloadable? (address, political party, office sought, election cycle, incumbent status, committees, etc)
• When an individual runs for more than on office in their lifetime, is there any way of telling if they are the same person from the data?

When we're deploying changes, etc, we should stick the app into maintenance mode. There seems to be an OK django package for that here: https://github.com/fabiocaccamo/django-maintenance-mode

Right now we're just adding up everything for all time to create these numbers. Lets group them by election cycle as well so that you get top transactions by cycle.

It could be very nice to have some reference lines in the visualisations to indicate if a person has a lot or a little amount of money for the race they are running for.

Not exactly sure what the right reference point would be. Here are some ideas

• Median amount of money among other people running for that office now
• Median amount of money among incumbents for that office
• Median peak amount of money for people running for that office in last cycle