New Save / share and Load buttons in the toolbar. Save gives you a link that rebuilds your exact map — nodes, colors, custom connections and all — when anyone opens it, plus a snippet to embed a live, interactive version right inside a blog post, and a file download for backup. Load restores a map from a link or a saved file. Nothing is stored on a server; the whole map travels in the link itself.
Open any lobbyist or lobbying firm and you’ll now see the total they were paid for lobbying, broken down by year — for a firm, added up across all of its lobbyists. And the link between a company and a lobbyist now reads in plain language: “Company paid Lobbyist $X for lobbying services,” with the year-by-year amounts underneath.
When a company is linked to a bill because it had a lobbyist working that bill, you can now expand that link to show the actual lobbyist in between — turning one summary line into the real chain of who worked for whom. Expand several bills and the shared lobbyist connects them all.
Every company, politician, committee and lobbyist now has a “Report this entity” button — flag a misspelled name, wrong details, or an apparent duplicate, and an admin reviews it. Companion to the existing “Report this link” button.
Records whose names differed only by a comma, a period, capitalization, or a leading “The” were being kept as separate entities — so one real company’s money and connections could be split across several nodes. Those are now recognized as the same name typed differently and combined automatically, which merged over 1,100 duplicate records. Names that differ in a way that could genuinely mean two different businesses (like “Smith Consulting” versus “Smith Consulting LLC”) are still reviewed by a person first.
New “Find path” tool in the toolbar — pick any two entities on the map and it searches for a chain of connections between them, even ones that aren’t directly linked. You can set a maximum number of hops, or leave it open-ended. If nothing connects directly, it checks whether a related entity (like an unlinked committee sharing a politician’s name) does, and shows you that path instead.
Committees and politicians now show a clear breakdown right in the side panel: total raised, total spent, and how much of the money raised came from individuals versus PACs and committees versus businesses.
When you open “Show connections” on an entity with lots of different kinds of links, you can now filter down to just the type you’re looking for — bills, companies, lobbyists, and more — with a live count next to each.
Contributions from one PAC or committee directly to another, and from businesses to committees, weren’t always appearing as a connection on the map even though the underlying filing existed. Fixed — thousands of these connections are now visible.
Some committees report moving money between their own accounts as a “contribution” to themselves, which showed up as a confusing loop on the map and inflated their totals. These are now filtered out of both.
See a connection on the map that looks wrong? Every connection now has a “Report this link” button — flag it and an admin reviews it. Helps keep the map accurate.
You can now see which companies had lobbyists working a given bill, and open any company to see the bills it lobbied on.
Contribution records now show the donor’s employer, the stated purpose, and the type of expenditure, plus a breakdown of who a donor gave to.
Donors are linked to their employers where we can identify them, and the map now surfaces overlaps between donors, lobbyists, business officers, and politicians.
Hardened the site against a class of security issues, made large data imports finish cleanly under heavy load, and improved how import progress is reported.
The connections map now works properly on phones and tablets — a collapsible menu, a slide-up details panel, and the search bar always within reach. The admin panel got the same treatment, including tables that scroll instead of running off screen.
Added the welcome popup you're reading right now, along with the how-to-use and privacy pages — updatable independently of the rest of the site.
The background process that keeps the connections map in sync with the underlying data is significantly faster for large updates, and now recovers cleanly if it's interrupted partway through instead of needing a full restart.
Colorado Politics Map goes live, with automatic HTTPS and hardened access controls.
Lobbyist-client relationships now show a full year-by-year, month-by-month income breakdown instead of a single total. Added a bulk upload page for lobbyist disclosure data.
Bills now link directly to their official page on the Colorado General Assembly site and LegiScan.
Removed duplicate company and connection records, and fixed cases where old connections were lingering on the map after the underlying data changed.
Individual campaign donors are now tracked as their own entities, separate from the committees they give to.
Politician profiles are automatically enriched with additional public data from LegiScan, and duplicate politician records are merged automatically.
Nodes and connections on the map can now be recolored, resized, badged, or removed, and committees can be linked to their candidates directly from the map.
Added Colorado campaign finance (TRACER), the Colorado General Assembly, LegiScan, Colorado Lobbyist Disclosure, Colorado Secretary of State business registrations, and OpenFEC federal filings as data sources for the map.
The very first version of the connections map: search for an entity, add it to the map, and explore how it connects to others.