Rachel Cox  Check Yr Reps Update #1

Hello! I am a designer— I only know HTML and CSS. But I have an idea for a website that would engage people in local politics.

Let me start from the beginning. I am a Bernie Sanders supporter. Having never been politically active, I now am at the age of 35. I'm trying to learn and keep up-to-date with local politics since "politics start at the local level" and stuff. I can't find any active local political blogs for Philly. Nary a one! So I started thinking… how can we get people excited and engaged in local politics? How can we hold our elected representatives accountable? How do we know what they're doing with OUR MONEY?

I would like to make a website that identifies the user's representatives based on their zip code and/or nearest intersection (using this: http://whoismyrepresentative.com/) and show them a feed full of news involving their reps. Since the Google News API has been deprecated, this could be difficult.

The resulting feed should look like facebook or pinterest… you can sort by date, or federal/state/county, or click on one rep's name and see a feed full of their news- their mentions on twitter, article, items of legislation they have signed or voted on. The point is to make this very user friendly and accessible. Additional features like message boards or public posts might work. The beta version could be just for Pennsylvania to keep it simple.

Thanks for reading.