Leverage: Project Update: Summer 2016

The summer of 2016 was a busy summer for both the city of Philadelphia and members of Leverage. While the city hosted the Democratic National Convention, Leverage participated at the American Experiments Showcase Challenge. In addition we met for hacknights, held a UX feature workshop and distributed a user surveys to hundreds of citizens. New members James Lott, Chris Medykiewicz and Remi Adewale joined the group adding technical skills and experience to the technology and visualization teams.

The American Experiments Showcase Challenge provided Josh Werner, Jacqueline Siotto and Casey Vaughan a chance to answer attendee questions and demo a prototype of Leverage. "We were honored to be included in the showcase which included applications in use from around the country such as Democracy Works and Ballot Ready". In speaking with conference attendees we had many takeaways. First, we learned that some people are interested in seeing campaign expenditure data as well as donations received. Second, we learned that users desire the ability to drill down on the data and that infographics should be clickable into a subset of data if possible. Third, many attendees expressed a strong concern that we avoid assumptions about the public domain knowledge about campaign finance. In other words we need to meet the community where it is.

In the Fall of 2016 Leverage will be busy. The team will regroup as an evergreen project at CaaSH. We will utilize the extended face time to reach a consensus on a core feature set that will be built out in as an MVP (Leverage 1.0 application) for #CaaSH demo night being held Oct 25th. In addition the Leverage team will be meeting at a Hacknight later in the Fall to view a presentation by strategy lead, Jacquiline Siotto that summarizes information gleaned from our citizen summary.