Chicago Lobbyists

See the interactions between the City of Chicago, lobbyists and their clients.
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ChicagoLobbyists.org is an open data, open government, and open source project intended to improve the transparency of interactions between the City of Chicago and lobbyists and their clients. All data comes from the City of Chicago Data Portal.

This site is built with Ruby, PostgreSQL and uses the Sinatra web platform. It is hosted for free, courtesy of Heroku.

This site is for anyone who is interested in how lobbyists interact with Chicago’s government. It could be used in the following ways:

  • as a resource for firms looking to hire effective lobbyists based on their performance, cost, and experience
  • by lobbyists themselves to rate and compare their own performance
  • by journalists as a research tool
  • by citizens to who seek to understand how their local government works and to see the role that lobbyists play in it
  • by the City of Chicago as a tool to comply with their lobbyist ethics ordinance (specifically the “Creation of a searchable online system for registration and reporting.”)

The website can be used by the City of Chicago, its citizens, as well as lobbyists and their firms.