Corinne Ramey

TheMiddleClass.org: Websites, Widgets and Wonderful Feedback

It's been called "incredibly nifty," "very, very cool" and "very hip."

The new Google Phone software? The latest Wes Anderson film? Nope. it's DMI's fancy new website, TheMiddleClass.org.

We launched the website this past Tuesday, and the blogosphere has been swarming with feedback ever since. DMI has a saying that if a report hasn't been read, it hasn't been written. Given the amount of response we've received about the website, our new "middle class toolkit" has been written A LOT of times. Some reports from the blogosphere:

Politicians who received high marks didn't hesitate to brag about their scores. The campaign of presidential hopeful Chris Dodd called the website "far more accessible" than previous years because it was released when the legislature is still in session. "Chris Dodd scores 100% on middle-class matters," his campaign bragged. Anthony Weiner, a Congressman representing Brooklyn and Queens, sent out a press release announcing "Weiner Receives a Perfect Score for his Record in Congress as a Fighter for New York’s Middle Class."

Trapper John raved about the website on the front page of Daily Kos last Tuesday, calling the site a "one-stop shop for folks looking for information on key legislation affecting working Americans." He mentions the "high quality abstracts of the bills" and "video summaries of the bills" as highlights of the site. TheMiddleClass.org showed up the following day on Daily Kos, with well-known diarist DemFromCT linking to the DMI analysis of the SCHIP legislation in his post, “SCHIP Stories: What Republicans are Saying Now." The diary received a lot of comments.

Joshua Levy at techPresident declared himself a big fan of DMI's easy-to-use widget maker, and even made his own widget of Vermont's legislators. "In a New York minute you can build a widget that displays scoring data for individual legislators or past or present bills, or a simple search box that can be used to search for bills or legislators." And he has plenty of good things to say about the rest of the site as well. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen a site that so compellingly presents such essential information about new and pending legislation,” he wrote. Ellen Miller at Sunlight Foundation agrees, saying that TheMiddleClass.org has the potential to increase transparency in government. “The folks at DMI hope congressional members, knowing that they are being watched, will place a higher priority on the interests of average Americans, and not those of the fat cats and other monied interests that usually receives all the attention,” she writes. The website was also mentioned in MyDD's "Midweek Diary Rescue."

Over at The Albany Project, Phillip Anderson called TheMiddleClass.org "the coolest site ever," and announced that he was "off to build some widgets." Ben Smith from Politico agrees, admiring DMI's "designer widgets."

There's no end to the ways that people have figured out ways to use TheMiddleClass.org. Nancy Scola at Air America links to the pages of Ron Paul, Hillary Clinton, and Barack Obama, noting that you can use the scorecard to track presidential candidates. Johne from Square State made his own custom widget with legislators from Colorado, and Keystone Politics Delegation '08 has a widget on their site with the percentage scores of Pennsylvania Congresspeople.

In fact, DMI's widgets are showing up all over the web. My Left Nutmeg features a Connecticut widget, and Blue Jersey has a very large New Jersey one. The Right's Field has a widget that showcases the (somewhat pathetic) scores of several Republican Congresspeople that are running for President, and The Albany Project is announcing the scores of all the Congresspeople from New York. Want to build your own? Click here.

The State of Opportunity, the blog of the Opportunity Project, has called the site an "innovative new media project" with a "democratizing role of holding politicians accountable to the voice of their constituents by reporting on legislation in an interactive fashion.” Even the Sheet Metal Workers International Association loved the website, writing that the site "empowers ordinary citizens – not just political insiders – to know how their legislators voted on the issues that matter most to them.”

And now, last but not least, it's time for my personal favorite. Vince Leibowitz of Capitol Annex called TheMiddleClass.org a “snazzy new website,” and proceeded to evaluate more than twenty Texas Congresspeople on their percentage scores. Leibowitz, in language that's not usually used to describe a website, wrote, “So turn down the lights, put on some soft music, pour yourself a nice glass of wine, and let’s see who’s been screwing the middle class.”

Don't have wine or soft music with you, or just not feeling in the mood tonight? It doesn't matter --TheMiddleClass.org's healthy dose of political transparency and Congressional accountability is intoxicating on its own.

Corinne Ramey: Author Bio | Other Posts
Posted at 7:15 AM, Nov 09, 2007 in TheMiddleClass.org
Permalink | Email to Friend