Thank you for being interested in Jungle Primary. When I started this website, our political landscape seemed hopelessly broken. The government was shutdown because Congress could not pass a spending bill and politicians seemed more dedicated to partisan bickering and pettiness than being accountable to their constituents.
Along the way, I developed two versions of Jungle Primary. The first was a rating and review app so that people could hold their representatives accountable. I quickly learned that there was a gap in coverage of what Congress was working on and that potential users didn't feel that had enough information to rate and review their representatives. When Congress was covered in the news it was in terms of horse races and marginal changes in polls, big personalities and outrageous claims, and wonky chess games over filibuster and budget reconciliation.
And so for my second iteration of Jungle Primary, focused on providing content and coverage of Congressional bills and resolutions. I used my data science and natural language processing skill set and stitched together text summarization and paraphrasing models to automatically generate news articles based on congressional bills.
In reflection, this was a bad idea for a business and I will ever have to answer for the time that I spent trying to make people interesting in boring news. During the time that I worked on Jungle Primary, media scholars and commentators called attention to the problems with media bias and tabloid journalism.
But the market speaks and it's time to shut down Jungle Primary. I'm grateful for the time that I spent working on this project, the lessons that I have learned, and hope one day to find a solution.