RealityPrime

Google Gets Political - Post I.T. - A Technology Blog From The Washington Post - (washingtonpost.com)

As Stefan notes, this is more of a political story than an IT one. I’ve been hoping for something like this for some time. Many thanks to the young googlers who bubbled this up in their 20% time. The Earth is a perfect metaphor for visualizing just about any geospatial information, and voting districts are certainly one important kind.

Back in June, I tried to challenge game and 3D world developers to go one step farther, and use the kind of cutting edge UI design and visualization found in games (esp. strategy games) to connect the dots between votes and fund-raising. I think the GE version will be an amazing tool to start. But for the next step, we should realize this is often more abstract than geography. Tobacco companies used to be fairly regional, and you could see their influence in a heat-map of the mid-Atlantic US. But it’s not as true anymore, as they expand farther into foreign markets with less protective laws. Oil and gas companies, for example, are already multi-national. So seeing their effects in Congress may not make as much sense on a literal map. Geography is an important piece of the overall puzzle, but only a piece. And visualization can help us see more abstract relationships too.

What I’d love to see next (perhaps from Google, perhaps not) is a dynamic charting app (2D or 3D) that can group officials by both regional and abstract issues, where brand new maps are created based on the best available information.

For example, if we clicked on Energy policy, we could see officials sorted spatially by how much money they receive from various Energy interests (imagine each lobby or issue is given a corner of the screen, with the candidates position as a function of the weighted averages of the relative contributions). We’d see a picture of two or more sides of an issue from the money-flow perspective, also showing how one side dwarfs the other in scale. And then if we organized the data by voting record instead of money, we could see how much each official’s icon moves on screen. This is a visual measure of how “independent” he or she is. An official who receives money but doesn’t vote in lock step may be one we can tolerate. An official who votes with the money every time is essentially a paid puppet. We might be able to combine these two views and show, in a single glance, how much each official is working for the voters vs. the sponsors.

Anyway, those young googlers are certainly right that the web-based UI for this political information isn’t working as well as it should. But that doesn’t mean Google can’t also go farther with this approach. I’ve always believed the “zoom and pan a sphere” UI that powers GE would do well to explore any set of information, even for more abstract relationships.

For example, consider the beautiful Budget Graph we’ve all probably seen. Now, it’s very packed with information, and the placement of each line item is hand-massaged to make it all fit. But imagine this same data wrapped onto a non-geographic Virtual Earth, and relaxed a bit to allow for more detail in the black-spaces between the data. Imagine zooming into this at lower and lower levels, flying around the data like some alien geography. Visual-size on the new graph still probably represents budget size. But now we can perhaps move circles around with our mouse, compare and contrast. Imagine being able to reorganize the data on the fly automatically too, but still keeping that nice pan and zoom paradigm.

That’s what I’d really like to see. We may yet come up with the killer app for politics, that shows in a glance where your money is going, and who’s putting it there, and in an easy-enough UI that anyone can use.

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