Workflows

Main Workflows

There are 4 main Code for Democracy workflows, which comprise the core of our search, visualization, and alerting tools:

1. Create a List — You can start here to build your own custom analysis or skip this workflow entirely if you just want to use the pre-loaded content. Our list creation workflow aims to make it easy to define groups of entities (candidates, donors, terms, etc.) to investigative.

2. Create a Query — Queries are the core of our bulk search capabilities. Each query uses a recipe, which is a specific search formula optimized for our datasets. By creating a query, you're creating a search that can be run again in the future with just one click.

3. Create a Visualization — This workflow takes the results from a query and formats it in customizable ways before sending it to a visualization engine. This workflow aims to make it easy to re-create visualizations when new data is available.

4. Create an Alert — Alerts let you know when new results are available for a query, or perhaps when no results have been available for awhile. When an alert is triggered, our platform will send you an email with a link to the new data.

Mini-Tools

There are 3 Code for Democracy mini-tools, which combine exploratory with advanced discovery capabilities in order to aid in the creation of lists:

1. Explore Lists — A quick way to define new lists is to look at lists that have already been defined, and then clone them in order to add your own customizations.

2. Explore Relationships — This tool helps you explore connections between entities in our datasets in two different ways. It's meant to help brainstorm entities to add to your lists.

3. Explore Documents — Our topic lists are basically ontologies, and creating them can be complex. You can test how terms appear in documents using this tool.