jlord / federal-gov

Federal Government

This is a website generated from a Google Spreadsheet of articles about the actions of the United States Federal Government in 2017.

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Why

There are a lot of things happening daily as a new administration prepares to take the helm of the US Government. I see links scattered throughout my social media feeds and I wanted to try consolidating these things in a way where I (and others) might be able to see the breadth of what's going on in a simplified but informative way.

Selection

I am selecting events which challenge the way the US Government functions. Right now these are broadly categorized by what it is that made each event newsworthy: Is it an illegal conflict of interest? Is a lie? Does it intend to hinder the normal functions of the government? Is it a shocking break with convention? If the government does something good that's great, but those aren't the things to cover here. Feel free to fork this repository and create that site if you so desire.

Sources

Right now the information is added by me to a spreadsheet manually as I read about events either through my social media feeds or directly from the publication.

Week 1

Since I'm starting this a week into the new year, I used an existing list of events (which were derived from this tweet) to cover last week.

Presentation

The way the information is presented on the site has to do with some experiments that were in my head.

Simplify Information

Similar to my Essential Electron project, I wanted to challenge myself to simplify as much as I could. Of course full articles for more in depth information is provided.

Don't use names

Rather than use proper nouns, I'm using titles or relationships. Abstracting them one level seems more like the reflection on the country as a whole and our government rather than an individual, which is interesting to me.

Future

I want to experiment with formats more (calendar? table?) and add sorting and filtering.

Technical

This site uses a band-aided version of my sheetsee.js (I am gonna be refreshing the project soon!) library and tabletop.js to visual data from a Google Spreadsheet.

Want to use the data in your project?

The data from the spreadsheet is public and accessible through this Google Spreadsheet key: 17H2IL-o2G-JAwaukZCZ0aCfL09nEthZb_EUrB3wikwY. You can use the Google API to work with it or a library like Tabletop.js which will return the contents to you as nice, clean JSON.

federal-gov's Issues

Add RSS Feed

It's been requested 👍

Contributions!

Starting a discussion on contributions.

Tech Contributions

Here on GitHub as Pull Requests of course! In the coming weeks I'll be working more on the underlying library, sheetsee.js, but typos and CSS fixes (or whole new/better layouts!?) and whatnots can definitely happen here.

Article Contributions

I've had a project with a totally open spreadsheet before and that was tough to manage and revert when bad input was entered. And because of the nature of the contents the submissions will need to be checked to be real anyways so here's what I'm thinking (and have set up):

1. Fill out Google Form with new submission.
2. New submissions are reviewed via response spreadsheet (anyone can comment).
3. Submissions are copied onto final spreadsheet data for site (anyone can comment).

Google Form Submissions

Hi @jlord,
Thank you for starting this project.

I find that having two different platforms for collaboration a bit cumbersome.
Especially when the chat system on Google Spreadsheets doesn't lend itself well to asynchronous collaboration.

Suggestion

What if Google Form submissions/responses end up as JSON blobs that are pull-requested into, say, data/ directory that lives at the root of this project?
PROS

• Allow for collaboration and communication on one unified platform.
• Each article in question could be reviewed, modified/edited/changed in isolation.

CONS

• The page would have to send one GET request per article, which could slow down the perfomance of the site in the long run.
• Example GET request would look like:

  <script src="https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jlord/federal-gov/master/data/president-elect-son-in-law-senior-white-house-advisor.json" type="application/json"></script>
  

  • This leads to tight coupling of static page(s) and content.