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Ars technica brings us Track who's buying politicians with "Greenhouse" browser add-on:
Nicholas Rubin, a 16-year-old programmer from Seattle, has created a browser add-on that makes it incredibly easy to see the influence of money in US politics. Rubin calls the add-on Greenhouse, and it does something so brilliantly simple that once you use it you'll wonder why news sites didn't think of this themselves.
Greenhouse pulls in campaign contribution data for every Senator and Representative, including the total amount of money received and a breakdown by industry and size of donation. It then combines this with a parser that finds the names of Senators and Representatives in the current page and highlights them. Hover your mouse over the highlighted names and it displays their top campaign contributors.
In this sense, Greenhouse adds another layer to the news, showing you the story behind the story. In politics, as in many other things, if you want to know the why behind the what, you need to follow the money. And somewhat depressingly, in politics it seems that it's money all the way down.
So a 16 year old kid figures out how to not just connect the dots; but show how the money that is buying our government is affecting it. Are there any other tools that can help visualize the data? How else can we perpetuate these tools to the public?
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Lazarus on Thursday August 14 2014, @06:38PM
>So a 16 year old kid figures out how to not just connect the dots;
This isn't surprising. As we get older we get set in our ways of thinking, so something we might not think of can be obvious to a smart young person.