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      <h3>About</h3>
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        <li><a href='#what-is-this'>What is this?</a></li>
        <li><a href='#for-organizers'>Organizers: reuse our code!</a></li>
        <li><a href='#credits'>Team and credits</a></li>
        <li><a href='#report-data'>Reporting outdated or missing information</a></li>
        <li><a href='#code'>We're open source</a></li>
        <li><a href='#contact-us'>Contact us</a></li>
        
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    <h2 id="what-is-this">What is this?</h2>

    <p><strong>My Reps</strong> is a tool for looking up who your <a href='https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representative_democracy'>elected representatives</a> are across the United States. Based on your address, we can find all the federal, state, county and local officials who represent you in government.</p>

    <p>Knowing who these representatives are and contacting their offices directly is the most effective way to change how our government works.</p>

    <p>Have an issue you care about? <strong>Find your rep and tell them!</strong></p>

    <p>For more, read our launch blog post: <a target='_blank' href='https://datamade.us/blog/we-find-your-reps-so-you-dont-have-to'>We find your reps so you don't have to</a>.</p>

    <h2 id="for-organizers">Organizers: reuse our code!</h2>
    
    <p>We built this tool to be open source and easy to repurpose. Feel free to copy and reuse the <a href='https://github.com/datamade/find-my-reps'>My Reps codebase</a> and customize the messaging and content for your issue.</p>
    
    <p>Instructions on how to get started are in the <a href='https://github.com/datamade/find-my-reps'>GitHub repository</a>. For an example, see <a href='www.participatorybudgeting.org/myreps'>My Reps</a> by the Participatory Budgeting Project and the <a href='https://github.com/datamade/my-reps-pbp'>open source code</a> for it.</p>

    <h2 id="report-data">Reporting outdated or missing information</h2>

    <p>Information on elected officials comes from the <a href='https://developers.google.com/civic-information/'>Google Civic Information API</a>, which aggregates data across the United States on elected officials in federal, state, county and local government offices.</p>

    <p>Sometimes data is outdated or missing. If you notice an issue with the data, please <a target='_blank' href='https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScFpFTOkTpm0YoerLLprY_ySS9PRXLsu27SM01hebHqkefW2Q/viewform'>report it to Google</a>.</p>

    <h2 id="credits">Team and credits</h2>

    <p><a href='https://datamade.us'>DataMade</a> built this representative lookup tool for the <a href='http://www.participatorybudgeting.org/'>Participatory Budgeting Project</a> to help them advocate for more <a href='https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Participatory_budgeting'>participatory budgeting</a> in local government. Participatory budgeting is a process of democratic deliberation and decision-making, and a type of participatory democracy, in which ordinary people decide how to allocate part of a municipal or public budget.

    <p>To get an elected official to take up a particular government policy like this, one of the most effective strategies is to empower their constituents to directly advocate for it.

    <p>We built an initial version of this tool for the Participatory Budgeting Project, called <a href='http://www.participatorybudgeting.org/myreps'>My Reps</a>, and used it as a basis to make this more general version of it.

    <p>The team is:

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      <li>Derek Eder - coding, design, copy</li>
      <li>Eric van Zanten - coding</li>
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    <h2 id="code">We're open source!</h2>

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      All the code for this site is <a href='https://github.com/datamade/find-my-reps'>open source</a>. It was built with Jekyll, Bootstrap and Javascript.
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    <p>Technologies used:</p>
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        <a href='http://jekyllrb.com/'>Jekyll</a>
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        <a href='http://getbootstrap.com'>Bootstrap</a>
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        <a href='https://developers.google.com/civic-information/'>Google Civic Information API</a>
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    <p>All the code for this project is up on <a href='https://github.com/datamade/find-my-reps'>GitHub</a> and under the open source MIT license.</p>


    <h2 id="contact-us">Contact us</h2>

    <p>Found a bug? <a href='https://github.com/datamade/find-my-reps/issues'>Report it on our issue tracker</a>!</p>
    
    <p>Have a suggestion? Want to set customize this tool for your organization? Contact DataMade at <a href='mailto:info@datamade.us'>info@datamade.us</a></p>

    

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