Imagine your conservative uncle reading a Facebook article about “Mitch McConnell” where every instance of his name has been replaced with “Mitch McConnell, who’s received 2M from the banking industry,”
Owner Donor
I created a browser extension called “Owner Doner” last year that does just this. A new job and twins have kept me from maintaining it.
I still think it’s a great idea and would be invaluable in educating both sides on the corrupt donations politicians receive. I’m happy to hand the reigns over to someone else.
To Do Dreamlist
- Update datasheet: The extension uses data from opensecrets[dot]org. I was doing this manually. It hasn’t been updated since last year. Open Secrets has an API where data can be scrapped automatically.
- The current version is a little repetitive. It always shows the same stat. It would be great if each instance of the name was concatenated with a different donor. It’d be a more convincing message of exactly how bought our politicians are.
- Currently, the extension concatenates the name with the total donation from the biggest industry and the name of the industry. I’m not sure this is the best message for every politician. Maybe a more curated list will be more convincing.
- Add a hyperlink to the politicians’ page on opensecrets[dot]org
- Make local datasets for local elections
- Make versions for different browsers. Currently only in Chrome
- Make a mobile app that will change names on mobile devices
- Tons of additional ideas
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I LOVE this! A lot. I want to help!
Great idea. I posted something yesterday that would fit this. What about coming up with a corruption index/score so each member could be shown with how bad they are compared to others.
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@ProgressiveX, I think these are all great ideas. I’d like someone with dev and project management experience to take over.
@brown_eyed_dragon Thanks! Do you have any development exp? If not, there’s still a lot to do. There’s also a ton of other “branding stuff” like creating a logo for the extension. There’s also a lot that’ll need to be done to get the word out. I bought the domain Owner Donor. That can be built out. The only thing I’m adamant about is that the extension stays free. I’d really like a captain that understands the dev and app building process to take over.
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Unfortunately, I do not have any development exp. 
I’m a teacher, with teacher skills lol. My tech experience is more related to photo, video, and social media.
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No worries. Teaching is arguably the most important job in society. After all, the extension is just a way to educate people. I’ll keep a list of everyone who wants to help and hand it over to whoever takes over.
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I wish I were the type who had a solid understanding of programming, because I feel that there’s value in this. This isn’t a thought for now, but if this does get proper support in the future, but it would be great if the plugin could recognize both the politician’s name and the industry most involved in the body of the article (financial, medical, firearm, etc.) and provide the donation total from all donors from the industry being talked about.
Imagine if the plugin could recognize that the article is about the pharmaceutical industry, and could directly provide the amount of donation the politician received from that industry. It would help clarify any “unintentional bias” that politician could have on the article’s contents itself.
Conceptually, this would require some level of comprehending AI to understand the relevant industry (wait, most articles are tagged with that sort of info for search engine optimization, we can pull from that), then API calls to opensecrets to pull the data on the fly. Again, I understand how these things would work, but I don’t know the actual coding to make it a reality. Still, it’s a great idea.
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Hey Guys,
I’m a developer of sorts, ie I’ve written a bunch of programs to pull data in from APIs and organize it in Java. If that is the sticking point, (ie figuring out the nuances of opensecrets data structure, and making the API calls to keep that data up to date in a accessible database. It should all be pretty doable. The harder part would be figuring out exactly how to push it into simple easy to understand formats without destroying the architecture of the underlying webpages. Its a really cool idea, If you would like to discuss further. I am looking for a way to use my skills to help fix our country. As corruption is the root cause, this seems like a good way to start and for TYT getting the opensecrets data into your own systems could have a number of interesting use cases.
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This is a great idea and I think it’s more feasible than you think. You wouldn’t need an AI, just some keyword sets for various industries. If those keywords appear in the article, then the extension could pull from a dataset for that specific industry. The extension would have to store a dataset for each industry, but totally doable. We just need a captain!
I’m happy to speak with you. I’m not a developer at all. I can go over what I’ve done so far. It’s a working extension, albeit very clumsily. If you feel like you’d like to take it over, I’d be happy to see this project go somewhere.
Thanks so much for your efforts!
Have you seen this browser extension yet? If you hold your mouse of Nancy Pelozi’s name on their home page you see what industries her financial support is coming from. I don’t think this extension is being updated anymore but perhaps if you team up - or at least share knowledge, and with the help of others, you can make an impact - ESPECIALLY as it’s an election year and knowing politicians funding is critical.
Hmmm… I can’t post a link apparently so you’ll have to put the link and the domain together yourself http:// allaregreen . us
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