HackOregon Turns Complex Campaign Finance Data into Understandable Graphics

Monday, November 03, 2014

Cornelius Swart, GoLocal PDX Director of Content

Catherine Nikolovski demonstrates HackOregon features on Oct. 29

A new website project promises to “lift the veil” off the murky world of campaign finance by turning vast amounts of data into easy to understand graphic illustrations.

The nonprofit group HackOregon launched its Behind the Curtain Project on Oct. 28, just one week ahead of the mid-term election. The site was build by roughly a hundred volunteers and took thousands of man hours.

Many are passionate about by what they see as a foreign invasion of “dark money” and Super PAC cash into Oregon politics.

"People are manipulating the system,” said volunteer Sam Higgins. “They are messing with our state. Like Citizens United - tons of money is pouring into the state.”

HackOregon hope to shed some light.

The group took the site live at a Tuesday night launch party, at the offices of mobile app developer Crowd Compass in Southeast Portland. HackOregon founder, Catherine Nikolovski, walked people through some of the features.

Opening the data on the No on 92 Campaign, that’s aims to defeat an effort to label genetically modified foods, the user immediately sees a row of 5 icons. The images represent money given by different classes of campaign donors: political action committees (PACs), businesses, grass roots donors (people who give less than $300), large donors, and political parties.

Almost all the icons were tiny dots, reflecting the small amounts of cash that each class has contributed. PACs and political parties contributed zero. Larger donors gave $300, grass roots donors $785. But the business icon loomed 100 times larger than any other. Under its red circle with the image of a brief case on it, read the number $19 million.

Turning numbers into meaning

The site pulls its date from OreStar, the state’s searchable campaign finance database. OreStar is a fairly powerful tool for researching who has given money to whom and to what campaigns. But it can be Byzantine, difficult to understand and searches often yield large spreadsheets files with dizzying amounts of raw numbers on them. Comparing the state website to HackOregon is a little like comparing Google to an old library card catalogue system.

The hardest part, however, was transforming the OreStar data into graphics that can be understood easily.

HackOregon data visualization for donors to Yes on 90 campaign.

“Breathing life into data, that’s most of the work,” said Nikolovski.

Nikolovski, a 25-year-old single mother, is a former Democratic Party fundraiser and currently works as a technology consultant. Her time in political fundraising informed her view that the state’s campaign finance system lacks transparency and accountability to the average citizen.

She created HackOregon in August of 2013 and moved the Behind the Curtain project from concept to live launch in about 10 months.

“We are doing it for data empowerment,” Nikolovski said. “Sometimes it feels like we are shackled by people who control our data and what they do to us.”

The project pulls data from public records, but there was no public support for the project from the Oregon Secretary of State’s office.

“There was no cooperation from the government in getting access to the data,” said volunteer Jason Brown, who works for Jama Software.

No Cooperation From the State

The site is almost literally a hack.

Higgins, a biotech scientists by trade, built a robot that scrapes campaign finance data off the Oregon Secretary of State website every day and brings it into HackOregon.com. The data HackOregon uses is all open to the public, but much of it can be very hard to find on OreStar.

“It was tough,” Higgins said of the work he did to pull the data off the public-facing parts of the site. “They definitely don’t want you in there.”

Volunteers say the site will continue to evolve and expand in the coming years. Nikolovski and the others hope the public will use it. The site is built off open-source technology, which allows anyone to use the architecture of the website free of charge.

Nikolovski plans to launch a Kickstarter campaign that will allow groups in other states to create their own sites.

“Its and incredible research tool,” Nikolovski said. “I feel like I don’t ever want to vote without it.”