A First Look at Topics

Ryan Pivovar / September 5, 2023

In the past month, we've added two new big features to the platform: topics and bill pages. Each bill page is tagged with topics which help users identify what the bill is about. Voting records on profile pages now also show the topics that belong to the associated bill for the voting record.

Here is a profile page where the first voting record now contains topics:

And here is a bill page (specifically this one):

Before we dive into this further, here's a quick look at some of the other things we've been up to in the last month:

We've created our first video going over what the platform is about and how to use it. We plan to use it to start reaching out to local governments, political science organizations, and other data-focused organizations across the country. Ultimately, we don't see By The Topics succeeding without a strong grassroots effort on our part.
With all the new bill pages, our platform has over 3,000 pages now, each with unique information about a particular politician or a specific piece of legislation.
We've greatly reduced our memory and CPU usage for our website resources, resulting in a roughly 10% reduction in server costs.
We've collected roughly 2,500 Creative Commons-licensed images for congressmembers, and we've started the process of adding these images to profile pages. Only about 2% of profile pages have images so far, so we still have a lot of progress to make in this area.
We've limited the number of voting records that appear on profile pages to just 100 voting records, which helps profile pages load much faster, particularly profile pages which previously had lots of voting records. For instance, House Representative Adam Schiff's profile page previously loaded with over 8,000 voting records and took a couple of seconds just to render. While this is an improvement in load time, we still need to allow users to paginate through the full list of voting records (or infinitely scroll through them) in the near future.

As mentioned above, here's the video we've made!

Now back to topics and bill pages. We've added over 500 bill pages to the platform! Each bill page has a list of associated topics which help the user identify what the bill is about.

How can you get to bill pages? When going through a politician's voting records, you'll now notice that some voting records have topics associated with them, and other markers that indicate the voting record has an associated bill page. When you click or tap on the voting record, you'll be taken to the associated bill page.

clicking through to a bill page from a voting record

We've completely redesigned the look and feel of voting records to show topics that the voting record is about, and to also show that users can click through to the bill page associated with the voting record.

Here are a few bills you can quickly look at:

This is just a small sample of the bills that have been introduced in the last year, but even so, there is a wealth of topics presented here: native americans, Alzheimer's disease, the state of public schools, and clean energy. There is so much legislation being introduced every year that there is a high chance some of it greatly affects you on an indvidual level.

There are different types of bills: regular bills, resolutions, concurrent resolutions, and joint resolutions, and each of these have a House flavor and a Senate flavor. In the future, we'll add much more insight into the differences between these types of bills.

The lifecycle of a single bill is quite long, perhaps much longer than most people might think. Each bill is likely voted on many times, and they may undergo many changes through amendments.

Both the House and the Senate have a variety of committees, each of which is responsible for certain subject matter. These committees make determinations about each specific bill they look at, which ultimately shapes the direction and success of the bill.

Bills start off with a sponsor or a set of sponsors, and over time the bill may take on more co-sponsors. These are politicians who helped write the bill, or vouch for it.

Bill pages are quite simple for now, but we intend on adding all of this information in the near future.

You may also notice that not a whole lot of voting records actually have topics and associated bill pages just yet. While that is true, we expect there to be a lot more topics showing up on voting records in the next month.

There's still much to do on the platform. Here's what we're looking to do in the next several months.

With the recent Republican presidential debate, it's become painfully clear to us that we need to make a concerted effort to add information about presidential candidates as soon as possible. We plan on starting this effort in the next month.
With the addition of topics, users are able to understand a little more about what a single vote represents, but in a lot of cases, this is still too difficult to understand. A bill might be about Medicare, but is it for Medicare, or is it against Medicare? Does it expand Medicare, or does it weaken it? We plan to add simplified summaries of each bill using ChatGPT, and we also plan to provide more context to each topic attached to the bill.
With over 3,000 pages on the platform, it is still too difficult to find things. Users are able to search for congressmembers by their name, but that's it. We're going to expand the navigation in our header to make it more clear how to find people and legislation. We're going to add a proper Search Results Page to display more search results for a given query. And finally, we're going to allow users to search by state (like "Alabama"), and by topic (like "veterans"). There is much more to the searching story, but this is a good start.

So that's topics and bill pages. We're excited about the direction the platform is going in, and we hope you are, too! As always, if you have any feedback for us, please let us know on LinkedIn, or reach out to us at hello@bythetopics.com.

- Ryan