Mashups & Politics

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One of the blocks we recently added to Popfly is “Campaign Contributions”. As many of you know the 2008 Presidential race is on! As part of the race the FEC requires that all individuals who contribute $50 or more have to report it and subsequently they expose the contribution as public record. At Popfly we decided it would be fun to import that data and using .net 3.5sp1 data services create a block where you can query that information. The information we collect includes the name, employer/occupation, amount, zip code and of course who the money was given too. It’s all public domain and can be found on the FEC web site. By exposing the data in Popfly though you can create some mashups of the information.

Simple bar graph, the first mashup I made takes a ZIP code and returns all the people who donated sums up the money and puts it on a graph. You can see the mashup below (or on Popfly at https://www.popfly.com/users/Andy/Campaign%20Contributions%20By%20ZipCode), and you can copy it and create your own version at https://www.popfly.com/users/Andy/Campaign%20Contributions%20By%20ZipCode.project.

Go ahead open it up! See how it’s made and have a play.

You can also create a new mashup using the block by going to: https://www.popfly.com/mashupcreator and search for “campaign” and you should see the block “Campaign Contributions” you can also find it by expanded the “New & Updated” category.

Try some of the operations, write your own queries! Help for the block is at: https://www.popflywiki.com/users;popfly;Campaign%20Contributions.ashx and you can find some help for writing your own custom queries at: https://www.popflywiki.com/DataServiceQuery.ashx.

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