Who filed it. A money connection now says whose report each transaction comes from: filed by the recipient, filed by the giver, or, for federal gifts between committees, filed with the FEC with the side not recorded. A gift that both sides reported is shown once and says so.
How connections are made. The About page has a new section describing the seven kinds of link on the site, what evidence each one uses, who decides it (a fixed rule, a person, or an automated review that a second check must agree with), and the words to look for on the map.
Cleaner organisation notes. Notes that only repeated a matching rule, or named an internal record id, no longer show; notes written by a person still do.
Find Text size in the top bar (in the menu on phones) and pick one of four sizes. It changes the side panel, menus, these pages and the labels on the map, and your choice is remembered on this device.
Lighter, calmer map. The map now sits on a light grid, with a new icon for each kind of entity, so politicians, committees, companies, lobbyists and bills are easier to tell apart. The legend lists the kinds of entity on your map with a count for each.
Vote colors changed. A yes vote is still green; a no vote is now plum instead of red, and both still say how the person voted in words. Expanded lobbying chains are clay, loans are dotted teal, and anything the map’s author added is dashed sand.
A tidier side panel. Details and connections are now separate tabs, with more space between icons and text. The connection filters and action buttons line up in even rows and columns, and money figures line up in a table.
Zoom buttons. Zoom in, zoom out and fit-to-screen sit at the bottom right of the map.
Fonts and icons from outside services. The new fonts load from Google Fonts and the icons from jsDelivr, alongside the map’s code, which already loaded from cdnjs. Your browser fetches these files directly, so those services see your IP address and browser details, as with any web request. Nothing from your map is sent to them.
Votes show how people voted. A vote line is now green for yes and red for no, and says so in words. Those colors are reserved, so a shared map can’t dress up an ordinary line as a vote. Expanded lobbying chains are drawn in indigo.
Record versus commentary. A small key appears whenever a map has votes, lobbying chains, or the author’s own links, badges or colors, so readers can tell public records from annotations. Connections show where they came from — the agency, how many filings, and the dates they span — and the map shows how current the data is. Text drawn from Wikipedia now credits it.
Plainer wording, right direction. Connections read “Donated to”, “Received from” and so on instead of database labels, and Find path now reads in the direction the money or relationship actually runs.
Harder to lose your work. Clear canvas asks first, Backspace while typing no longer deletes the selected entity, opening someone else’s link keeps a backup of your own map, and reloading after opening a link keeps your changes.
Phones, tablets and embeds. The details panel fills the screen on phones, toolbar buttons fold into the menu before the search box gets squeezed, and saved or shared maps open centered. Blog embeds are view-only and link back to the full map. Text is easier to read throughout, and the welcome screen now opens on every visit, without the personal note it used to carry.
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.