Show HN: Find members of Congress with similar voting records

This is fantastic. We need more sites like this. There are so many simple / enlightening / controversial patterns that are just waiting to have some light shed.

I've always thought we need a Congressperson "report card" that just summarizes their voting history. I mean it's really the only thing that matters about them.

Say there are some important arching issue "dimensions":

  - Collective bargaining
  - Obamacare
  - Education
  - Gun Control
  - Civil Rights
  - Same-Sex Marraige
  - Finance Industry Protection
  - Tort Reform
  - Raise Taxes on Rich
  - Raise Taxes on Middle Class
  - Lower Taxes on Rich
  - ...

Each dimension has it's own scale, [strongly pro, pro, neutral, anti, strongly anti]

If each bill in Congress is tagged with relevant dimensions and placed somewhere for each, then a Congressperson's record can be grouped on issues... That's what I want. I think the only thing stopping anyone from doing this is having this schema and maintaining the record of where each bill stands on all the important issues. Figuring out how to collate that information is a challenge, but it's definitely doable. In fact I think there are a lot of trustworthy people and orgs willing to pitch in on that. Personally I wouldn't even care about bills very far into the past if we were only capturing this sort of schema for forward-looking data so it can be useful in the future.

I wonder what Taubere / Govtrack.us thinks about that sort of information and how it can be organized. I'm sure he has ideas about it and could give insight. Obviously any analysis beyond yae/nay records has an inherent partisanship, if even slight, which I assume is part of the reason isn't on Govtrack, but he has to have thought about how those kind of data fit to the govtrack schema.

Thank you for your well written feedback. You clearly captured our initial motivations for starting congressbuddies with the line "...patterns that are just waiting to have some light shed." Exploring "dimensions" while making it accessible and informative from a UI and data crunching standpoint is clearly our next step. Furthermore even though we are open source, we want to make it transparent from an enduser's perspective regarding how this data is being computed all the way from the raw json to how a scale like the one you've mentioned is established. Our ultimate goal throughout this process is to raise awareness about our representatives and make it informative through a highly visual and graphic manner.

I'm British, but I thought I had seen something along these lines for the US. Here's the UK version: http://www.theyworkforyou.com/mps/