User:Oliviadey/sandbox

Wikipedia Draft
The Participatory Politics Foundation (PPF) is a United States non-profit organization which jointly operates the OpenCongress.org website, which is intended to encourage transparency in lawmaking and to facilitate public participation with the government. The non-partisan foundation plans to modernize the political system through technological advancements to increase civic engagement in government. The non-profit opened in February of 2007 and operates OpenCongress together with the Sunlight Foundation. David Moore, former Executive Director of Participatory Politics Foundation The PPFs main goal is to ensure the U.S keeps a fully representative democracy. To accomplish this, the foundation outlines four points that they believe would make the U.S succeed.

1: "A fully open government data."

2: "Civic engagement initiatives for broad-based public participation."

3: "Collaboration with outside partners in government innovation."

4: "Advocating for full public financing of elections and comprehensive electoral reforms."

Contents

 * 1Sunlight Foundation
 * 2OpenCongress.org
 * 3GovTrack
 * 4AskThem.io
 * 5Councilmatic
 * 6David Moore
 * 7References
 * 8External links

Sunlight Foundation
The Sunlight Foundation was founded in 2006 with the main goal of connecting the citizens of the US to Congress and the federal government through technology and the internet. This foundation is heavily funded through donations and has donors which include Open Society Foundation, The Pew Charitable Trusts, The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Omidyar Network, Bloomberg Philanthropies, and the Laura and John Arnold Foundation. Through these donations, the foundation was able to collaborate with PPF to create OpenCongress.org.

OpenCongress.org
Released in 2007 and founded by both the Participatory Politics Foundation and the Sunlight Foundation, OpenCongress.org was a resource where the public could interact with the government, and gain access to both real-time news and government data. More specifically the users could contact members of Congress via the internet by sending an email to congressional members regarding their stances on certain political matters through a page on the website. After, the users could share it with the OpenCongress.org community and their social media pages to interact with the public.

Across a span of eight years, the website had 29 million visits and 70 million page visits in addition to its 200,000 registered users. In March of 2016, OpenCongress officially closed its doors and merged into a new website called GovTrack. The Sunlight Foundation shut down the website because of more promising projects they had planned for the future (GovTrack). OpenCongress no longer has an up and running website.

GovTrack
Created in 2004 and eventually taking over OpenCongress.org, GovTrack was yet another non-partisan website for the public to obtain legislative information that encouraged engagement with the government. To aid participation in government, GovTrack pursues new developments on issues that its users find important, and publishes them for the public to use. This is all free, so the information can be viewed or shared by anyone with internet access. To ensure the company is non-partisan, they do not accept grants from any investors, political parties or government agencies that are partisan or are affiliated with partisan organizations. and have "no financers, sponsors, investors or partners with a political party or government agency".

Comparable sites to OpenCongress and GovTrack are OpenGovernment.org, AskThem.io, and Councilmatic, which all have the same goal of connecting local residents to state-level officials to express their opinions.

AskThem.io
AskThem.io was another later project developed by PPF and launched in February of 2014. It was a " free, open-source, non-profit, non-partisan platform where the public could interact with public figures". The website had a question-and-answer page where users could have their questions answered. These people included members of government and candidates in every state and congressional district, along with any verified Twitter account. AskThem has access to over "142,000 elected officials, including all 100 state governors, 432 state representatives and over 1,400 state legislatures nationwide".

AskThem worked as followed:


 * "Anyone can ask a question to any elected official or verified Twitter account."
 * "People sign-on to questions they support, voting them up and circulating them like online petitions."
 * "When a question reaches a pre-set threshold, AskThem delivers it to the recipient and encourages a public response."

In June of 2018, David Moore posted on the Participatory Politics Foundation blog that AskThem.io's website will be disabled until further notice. With the upcoming 2020 election, Moore is asking for volunteers to redesign the companies website with the intent increase "public accountability".

Councilmatic
Created by both the Participatory Politics Foundation and a civic tech company DataMade, Councilmatic keeps users up to date with information about their city council. Currently, Councilmatic is up to date with government information from New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Philadelphia. It is an open-data community resource that can publish data from city-legislations, elected officials, committees and more. Through coordination with PPF, Councilmatic works to  "Coordinated by non-profit PPF, this program works to “close the feedback loop” with local elected officials".

David Moore
David Moore was the Executive Director of both the Participatory Politics Foundation and their sister organization, Participatory Culture Foundation from 2007-2017. He also served as the program manager for OpenCongress.org from 2007, until its' closing in 2016. After working as an Executive Director at PPF, Moore stepped down from the position and co-founded Sludge in 2018. "Sludge is an investigative journalism website that aims to uncover systemic corruption in the media".

Responding to Peer Review
Thank you both for reviewing my article and leaving such positive comments. I appreciate you taking the time to read the article while leaving helpful critiques on the content written.

Brooke Baker

- I appreciate all the positive commentary on my organization, encyclopedic tone, and the credibility of my sources.

- As for the one critique, the headings is one aspect that I had some difficulty figuring out how to do. Frankly, it was actually quite simple and I just needed to put an equal sign (=) to make the titles larger and bolder. To fix this, I plan on making all the headings in that format so I cant allow for a more professional look to my article while also making it easier to follow for the readers.

Erika Badalyan

- The review of my article was extremely helpful and I wanted to thank you again for providing me with great critiques that will definitely aid me in my editing process. Again, it is reassuring to hear that I have provided sufficient content and remained pretty neutral thus far,

- After reading my article again, I do see some run on sentences that may lead to confusion. I changed the "The PFFS main goal is..." sentence to "The PPFs main goal is to keep representative democracy in the U.S as a thriving political system. To accomplish this, the foundation preaches four points that they believe would make the U.S to succeed."

- To fix the slightly persuasive tone in the financial section of the article, I changed the phrase "PPF had taken a hard-hit" to "PPF has steadily decreased in profitability".

- I have provided done some more research on more credible articles I could use and found these (linked below). With these articles, I plan on creating another sub section on the website, Councilmatic which we have discussed frequently in class. It is ran by the Participatory Politics Foundation and we have learned a lot of information about it in class/have access to many sources so I think it would be a good addition.

https://datamade.us/blog/demystifying-chicago-politics-with-councilmatic/

http://www.participatorypolitics.org/bring-councilmatic-to-your-city/

http://www.participatorypolitics.org/become-verified-on-nyc-councilmatic/

10/8 DRAFTING CONTRIBUTIONS

The Participatory Politics Foundation (PPF) is a United States non-profit organization which jointly operates the OpenCongress.org website, which is intended to encourage transparency in lawmaking and to facilitate public participation with government. The non-partisan foundation plans to modernize the political system through technological advancements to increase civic engagement in government. The non-profit opened in February of 2007, and operates OpenCongress together with the Sunlight Foundation.

The PPFs main goal is to ensure the U.S has a thriving representative democracy. To accomplish this, the foundation outlines four points that they believe would make the U.S succeed.

1: "A fully open government data."

2: "Civic engagement initiatives for broad-based public participation."

3: "Collaboration with outside partners in government innovation."

4: "Advocating for full public financing of elections and comprehensive electoral reforms."

OpenCongress.org

Released in 2007 and founded by both the Participatory Politics Foundation and the Sunlight Foundation, OpenCongress.org was a resource where the public could interact with the government, and gain access to both real-time news and government data. More specifically the users could contact members of Congress via internet by sending an email to congressional members regarding their stances on certain political matters through a page on the website. After the users could additionally share it with the OpenCongress.org community and their social medias pages to interact with the public.

Across a span of eight years, the website had 29 million visits and 70 million page visits in addition to their 200,000 registered users. In March of 2016, OpenCongress officially closed its doors and merged into the a new website for called GovTrack.

Created in 2004 and eventually taking over OpenCongress.org, GovTrack was yet another non-partisan website for the public to obtain legislative information and encourage engagement with the government.

Comparable sites to OpenCongress and GovTrack are OpenGovernment.org, AskThem.io, and Councilmatic, which all have the same goal of connecting local residents to state level officials to express their opinions.

Sunlight Foundation

The Sunlight Foundation was founded in 2006 with the main goal of connecting the citizens of the US to Congress and the federal government through technology and the internet. This foundation is heavily funded through donations and has donors which include Open Society Foundation, The Pew Charitable Trusts , The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation , the Rockefeller Foundation , the Ford Foundation , the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation , the Omidyar Network , Bloomberg Philanthropies , and the Laura and John Arnold Foundation.

David Moore

David Moore is the Executive director of the Participatory Politics Foundation and their sister organization, Participatory Culture Foundation from 2007-2017.

Finances

The PPF has had steadily decreasing profits and surpluses over the last few years. For a non-profit to survive, there needs to be enough monetary income to stay afloat whether it be from grants or donations. Starting out with close to $137,958 in 2013, PPF has steadily decreased in profitability and sat at -$14,041 in 2017.

10/1: FINALIZE YOUR TOPIC/FIND YOUR SOURCES

Participatory Politics Foundation

What I Want to Add:

'''- This article is extremely short and lacks any content at all besides a sentence about what the foundation is. I plan to add more information about the foundation itself like information about how it started, background of owner/sponsors, awards and accomplishments etc... It was also stated in the few sentences on the Wikipedia page that the foundation operates a website called OpenCongress.org and partnered with the Sunlight Foundation, so I would also like to maybe add a section on that. Finally, just finding good sources about the foundation would add a-lot to the article since most of it is just from the foundations home page.'''

Sources

-https://www.ffwd.org/tech-nonprofits/s/participatory-politics-foundation/

-https://www.huffpost.com/author/the-sunlight-foundation

-https://sunlightfoundation.com/2016/02/12/farewell-opencongress-hello-govtrack/

-https://www.govloop.com/community/blog/moore-on-opengovernment-org-researching-u-s-state-legislation/

-https://www.guidestar.org/profile/26-2296822

-https://www.ffwd.org/tech-nonprofits/s/participatory-politics-foundation/

- https://sunlightfoundation.com/2011/08/15/contact-your-member-of-congress-with-better-self-organizing-tools/ Coding it Forward

'''- Much of the information that the writer used to construct this page was from the "About" section under the "Coding it Forward Website". To fix this I would remove all of the primary sources, thus making the article more notable. Creating reliable citations and sources would be one of the main goals since this is the reason why it was flagged to being with.'''

'''- I would add specific information about the Coding it Forward internship, while trying to reach farther than just explaining what it is. I would try and find valuable content that explains how the Coding it Forward internship has affected outside businesses and the impact that the interns also had on companies.'''

Participatory Politics Foundation

- Add content and specific information regarding the Foundation, like the owner/goals/accomplishments etc.

'''- I noticed that all of the reference links were incredibly outdated (2008). I found some sources that I think would be great for recent information, and they are not primary sources.'''

'-There is also a warning on the top of the page that states, "This article needs attention from an expert in Organizations or Politics. Please add a reason or a talk'' parameter to this template to explain the issue with the article". I am currently not too sure how to fix this but this would definitely be my first concern that I would need to tackle when going into the editing process.'''

Countable (app)

- A good point that is quotes on the page is that this app Countable is closely related to Facebook, so if I were to add information I could do a section on its ties to the major company.

- Also, it says that the app was featured in news sources like GQ, Wired and Tech Crunch which could be great sources to add.

- Additionally, I would like to add some statistics about the company, and their growth/downloads and the apps popularity.

- I would also consider adding an image to make it more visually appealing.