Information architecture and navigation for multiple elections with a single locality or across localities about odca-jekyll HOT 2 OPEN

I did some reading back through the CUT Group research today, and did a bit of number crunching looking back at previous elections and their potential impact on the existing election. It made me realize that there is not too much a need to navigate freely between the current and other election. Sure, some candidates have run multiple times, but they have distinct accounts and tend to not keep enough money in them that it would impact them significantly in the next election.

All our user research shows that users are interested most in the current local election, including research that reported that the homepage should make it more evident the wealth of information contained in the site. For MVP -- we should make the answers to common questions like "Who has raised the most money?" easily apparent. In my opinion, to feature multiple elections, we should either create multiple products (e.g. another domain like "sanfrancisco.opendisclosure.org", which would allow us to keep Oakland at the apex domain) or subtle links (e.g. below a sidebar, footer, or something) in my opinion.

Another option would be to convert Open Disclosure into a product that is not focused on Oakland -- thus keeping the existing homepage that links to other jurisdictions. We could advertise the Oakland URL - oakland.opendisclosure.org or opendisclosure.org/oakland.

So for now, I lobby for:

• The homepage to be the Oakland 2018 ballot page
• A link to "View Other Elections" in the sidebar
• (possibly) A link on candidate pages to "View Candidate in previous election" if they ran before
• (possibly) A URL-based way to send people to different jurisdictions' ballot pages

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@tdooner can you link to the CUT group research you're referring to?

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