Legistorm: Transparency's Sidekick

We have added a small but important feature to our site that should make it much easier to find people on LegiStorm even if you don't know the exact form of their name.

The names of all the congressional staffers on our site come primarily from official salary records. If we get other information that suggest those names are a bit off (and they sometimes are), we will correct them. But that still leaves a lot to be desired because Jonathan may be the person's name but someone searching for Jon won't find him.

Thanks to a new feature, that's changing. We now give users the capability of searching under alternate names, whether that is a nickname or a maiden name. And users can also suggest alternate names for our site.

Take as an example the veteran political strategist Cathy Gillespie, the wife of former Republican National Committee chairman Ed Gillespie. We have her official name listed as Catherine H Gillespie because that's how she was listed in salary records. But now we also list her more common name of Cathy Gillespie, and if her high school friends want to find her, we also have her listed by her maiden name of Cathy Hay. http://www.legistorm.com/person/Catherine_H_Gillespie/22016.html

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In our quest to broaden the historical reach of our data, we have added another quarter of House staff salaries and another six-month semester of Senate staff salaries. We now have House salary data from Oct. 1, 2001 forward and Senate data from April 1, 2002 forward. In fact, we now make our coverage dates more transparent on our main salaries page, http://www.legistorm.com/salaries.html.