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Comment by jimterrapin | Hacker News Reader

My name is Jim Cupples and I work on RunForOffice.org Thank you for the suggestions and comments.

I'm a politics nerd that likes local government, and believe it has dormant power for movements. I wrote a piece called The Bottom Carries the Top that explains my thoughts on that stuff.

Anyway, I agree with many of the comments and we think the university positions is a great idea.

If you like, feel free to email me at jimcupples@gmail.com or cupples@nationbuilder.com

Hope to hear from you

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I tried looking at positions in my state (South Dakota district SD-13) and the state representatives and state senator seats have a 2016 date listed. Is there an issue getting good data for such a small state? I might be willing to help verify some of it.

Edit: Filled out the data entry volunteer form

You are correct. We're behind on updating from the 11/2016 elections, but will get to them within the next week.

Hey Jim, I just wanted to say that I personally would like to recommend this product, especially as it adds more offices and features. Great idea.

Before I share it widely, though, I'll probably wait for it to fix the issue of showing past elections as future, as that is very confusing for people who don't know term lengths off the top of their head.

Thanks very much! Yes, it is showing past results, and we probably won't get to fixing those for another 2 weeks. Some states have been completely refreshed, but we have around 30 more to go.

Hi Jim, this is a terrific tool.

It would be more useful for students if it included age requirements for offices (if any).

Thanks very much. You're right about including age requirements. We have the project in a stage where we just want to get it into people's hands to use. We have a lot of blank fields that we will go back to fill and make things more searchable.

It's great to hear what people are looking for. Thanks!

This looks like a fantastic work! I have pondered for a while on building software for political campaigns (albeit focused on Mexican independent politicians), and nation builder seems the closest to what I have in mind. Care to elaborate a bit on the state of political software and your experience in building and selling software for politicians?

I don't have as much experience building/selling software. I'm sure tha practically everyone on this board has better tech chops than me. I come from a poli-sci background and the work on this project is what exposed me to tech. I can happily speak to features that I'd like to see for political software, but when it comes to building software, I'm a poor resource.

Interesting! How is tech treating you so far? Care to elaborate on what you think is missing in political software?

Hi, Jim! Love the site, and I'm delighted that someone is offering this. It would be great if the page had the ability to offer feedback to you, but since you're on here I'll pass this along here. It would be really helpful if each office listed included the name and party affiliation (where appropriate) of the person currently holding that office. In many cases, my decision to explore running for an office will depend on whether I'm happy with the person representing me. Even better would be the name of the person holding the office as a Google link to that person's voting record, so we could click through and look at how that person has been doing in that office thus far.

Thanks for putting this together; I'll absolutely be keeping an eye on the site!

RunForOffice.org should have a Twitter handle.

Thanks, we do at @rfonb

I entered 94541 (Hayward, CA) and it listed some mostly correct ones but also City Council seats for Aurora, IL.

Great idea, btw

Ha. Correct. Ironically, today of all days we are having problems with our GIS. One of our stressed out engineers is working on it!

Not to pile on a ton of feature requests, I think the site is already great, but it would also be cool if it took age as an input, as some offices have age requirements.

You're right. We are going to have a more robust data set with those types of searchable features.

Honestly, I have a lot going on right now but I strongly believe in this cause. I'm happy to volunteer if you need help in any areas.

We'd love it. http://getinvolved.runforoffice.org/volunteer/?recruiter_id=...

Jim, great work! Don't let the haters on here get you down. This is an amazing idea.

Thanks very much!!

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