Mizzou News Apps: Project Open Vault

The 2012 Election cycle is gearing up in the shadow of the Citizens United v FEC U.S. Supreme Court decision. The court's ruling created room for so called "super PACs (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_action_committee#Super_PACs)", political action committees allowed to collect unlimited sums of money.

So what of accountability and transparency in the world of campaign finance? Well, journalists have certainly not given up. Super PACs, like other political organizations, spend money to influence opinion via advertisements on commercial television stations.

David Herzog (http://journalism.missouri.edu/staff/david-herzog/), a professor at the Missouri School of Journalism and students Allan Vestal and Kyle Deas, are part of an effort called Project Open Vault, which aims to collect information about political ad spending in the Columbia TV market and make it available to the public. POV is a collaborative reporting project of the J-School's newsrooms.

This month, come learn about how David, Allan and Kyle are building a news application using DocumentCloud (https://www.documentcloud.org/public/search/project:%202012AdVault), Django, the Brubeck CMS, Javascript and HTML. Learn about the design and data modeling challenges and information sources they have had to contend with, and what opportunities Project Open Vault will have for the coming summer and fall!