California Has 120 Lawmakers. This Newsletter Follows Your 2
Cal Poly professor Foaad Khosmood and alumnus Andrew Chan helped create a personalized newsletter focused on the two California lawmakers who represent you
Leading up to Cal Poly AI Day
This story is part of a series exploring how the Cal Poly community is putting artificial intelligence into practice while thinking critically about how it should be used. Cal Poly AI Day takes place Thursday, Oct. 22.
Following the California Legislature can mean sorting through bills, votes and hearings involving 120 lawmakers. My Legislator starts somewhere much simpler: with your address.
From there, the personalized CalMatters newsletter follows the state senator and Assembly member who represent you, delivering a weekly look at how they voted and the bills they authored.
That simplicity is intentional. Cal Poly professor Foaad Khosmood envisioned My Legislator as a way to take the wealth of legislative information available through Digital Democracy — a government-transparency project created at Cal Poly — and make it useful to people who might never dig through the data themselves.
“Everyone wants to know what their legislator is doing,” said Khosmood, who teaches computer engineering and computer science and software engineering. “So, I thought we could send out a weekly newsletter on what they are doing.”
Since its January launch, My Legislator has grown to more than 12,000 subscribers.
Reaching those readers, however, depends on turning an enormous stream of legislative activity into something they can absorb in a matter of minutes. Behind each personalized email, the system generates reports on every member of the Legislature, then selects the two relevant to each subscriber.
Most of that complexity is meant to disappear by the time the newsletter reaches an inbox. Pulling that off meant solving problems without an obvious path forward, a mindset familiar to the Cal Poly contributors behind it.
Figuring Out the How
Andrew Chan already knew the data behind My Legislator when he took on the project. The 2024 Cal Poly computer science graduate had first encountered it through Digital Democracy as a student researcher.
He also contributed to its AI Tip Sheets, which send journalists story ideas drawn from legislative hearings and votes. Chan continued with CalMatters as a contractor before joining the newsroom full time last November.
The assignment put Chan in charge of the technical side as the team prepared to go live. Digital Democracy’s Tip Sheets were designed for journalists; My Legislator had to make the same legislative material useful to people who don’t follow Sacramento for a living.
“I am impressed with the content we were able to fit in,” Chan said. “So much information and in a limited email — that was one of the biggest challenges.”
The logistics added pressure. The team had to wait long enough to capture the latest developments while leaving editors time to review the content before Monday’s send. It also created its own service to translate the underlying data into a format the newsletter system could use.
About four weeks before My Legislator went live, the team also began redesigning the newsletter. Chan remembers thinking the timeline sounded “insane.”
But the feeling was familiar.
At Cal Poly, he said, ambitious assignments often started before he knew exactly how he would solve them. With experience, the uncertainty became less intimidating.
“I learned to be comfortable with not knowing anything at the start,” Chan said. “It starts to build confidence.”
That confidence now shapes how he approaches his role at CalMatters. Colleagues with deep knowledge of the Legislature can envision what the newsletter should do. Chan’s role is to figure out how to make that possible.
“My job is to say, ‘Yes, it can,’ and then make it happen,” Chan said.
By January, the team had.
Making Sacramento Personal
Readers responded quickly, with My Legislator growing from about 2,000 beta subscribers to 9,000 within two months.
Some did more than subscribe.
Chan said readers began forwarding My Legislator information to lawmakers and asking why they had not voted on a particular bill. A missed vote that can be difficult to trace from outside the Capitol suddenly became something a constituent could ask about directly.
That accessibility matters, Chan said, because politics can otherwise feel distant or abstract.
“People don’t feel empowered to care since so much of the information feels so abstract,” he said. My Legislator gives them an entry point tied to their own district and daily lives.
The approach has also drawn attention beyond its readership. The approach has also drawn recognition beyond its readership. My Legislator was named a finalist in the Online Journalism Awards’ Excellence in Newsletters, Single Newsletter category.
With the legislative session now adjourned, the weekly sends have paused, but Khosmood is already considering what comes next. Ideas include newsletters centered on particular issues or off-session summaries that give readers a broader look at their legislators’ records.
Chan expects to remain in charge of the technology as those ideas take shape. Along the way, the newsletter has changed his own relationship with state politics and given him something he now shares with friends and family.
“I’ve seen my own investment and understanding of the Legislature grow,” he said. “It’s nice to be able to send to friends and family — it’s a good entry point and personalized for them, which makes it applicable for their day-to-day lives.”
Want to follow your own lawmakers? Sign up for My Legislator through CalMatters.
Top and bottom images:
Andrew Chan, a 2024 Cal Poly computer science graduate who oversees the technical side of My Legislator, works on code that helps turn legislative data into personalized newsletter content for subscribers across California.
