Bridge Grades is a report card for Congress.
We grade Congress on how collaboratively or divisively they govern by compiling objective 3rd-party data into a score that sorts legislative “bridgers” from “dividers” based on what a person says (public statements, speeches, social media), and what a person does (authoring and sponsoring bipartisan bills).
Bridge Grades offers citizen voters an alternative lens to evaluate and assess the performance of our United States legislators beyond ideology or party affiliation.
We believe toxic polarization and hyper-partisanship is holding us back. We are inspired to introduce incentive to legislators to seek collaborative win-win solutions for our common interests. Our multi-year quest is to build Bridge Grades into a transparent, open source, crowdsourced, and independently governed system protected from special interests. Durable and self-sustaining, we aim to build Bridge Grades into a public utility that offers citizen voters an easy way to sort Congressional bridgers from dividers, plus an incentive system that can lead toward more collaborative governance for our common interests.
Created by Brad Porteus and built through a collaboration of a huge roster of contributors, Bridge Grades is a project of non-profit organization Mediators Foundation of Boulder, Colorado.
Grading rubric contributors
This Bridge Grades rubric and methodology is a collaboration with IU Innovates (Indiana University’s Data Science as a Service) thanks to program sponsor Dr. David Wild at Luddy, program design mentor Kyle Stirling, Maria Aroca, and more than a dozen Masters candidates across two cohorts (Liz, Andy, Tyler, Siddharth, Utkarsh, Sai, Paul, Jason, Jaimie, Katrina, Bryant, Sanjana, Joy, Abubakar). Special thank you to Universidad del Norte, Data Science undergraduate phenoms Emanuel Carbonell Naranjo and Zharick Molina for stitching it all together under Maria Aroca’s exemplary leadership and oversight.
Other contributors
Michael Ernst for elegant graphic design. Dr. Royce Carroll for poly-sci sanity checks. Rich Hansen for helping kick off our very first alpha grading model. And to Rob Chesnut, Vanessa Otero, Mark Gerzon, Ron Cadet, and Al Cave for counsel, guidance, and mentorship along the way.
Gratitude to early patrons, friends, and family for providing seed funding to get us here.