RDL Evidence Map

Mapping the gravity of power and discourse.

A public-record map of funding, lobbying, and revolving-door relationships. It is built to answer one question clearly: where is money visible, where is scrutiny thin, and where does the evidence stop?

Revolving Door Lobbying in DC

RDL repository Think Tanks DC

Find where money is visible and scrutiny is thin.

Question money + scrutiny

Evidence public records

Map issue-space gaps

Guardrail inspect, do not accuse

Public records become clusters, gaps, and caveats. The map points to areas to inspect, not accusations to repeat.

Two public evidence surfaces, one governing question.

Think Tanks DC is the funding-transparency layer. RDL is the larger public-record lobbying and revolving-door layer. Together they move the work from "who funds the institutions?" to "where does money operate without an organized counterweight?"

Think Tanks DC: 75 Washington think tanks and 149 donors
funding records: 2,682 funding records from 2019-2024
corrected label: No Disclosed Government Funding
RDL filing scale: 726,268 federal lobbying filings
RDL universe: $37.7B reported income and 11,395 deduplicated entities
relationship graph: nearly 150,000 relationship edges

The origin question.

Know the ideology, the expertise, and the money behind the institution before you trust the argument.

The first artifact was Think Tanks DC: a public interactive dataset mapping funding relationships between Washington policy institutions and donors, built from IRS 990 filings through ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer, USASpending.gov, OpenSecrets, and self-disclosed funding pages.

Its six panels made opacity visible: a funding heatmap, ideology-versus-funding chart, triple-funded institutions, transparency scatter plot, donor network graph, and rankings table. It did not prove capture. It made asymmetry inspectable.

How the RDL system works.

evidence boundary

Raw Data to canonical IDs

The active RDL repository treats Raw Data/ as the evidence boundary and resolves public exports for firms, clients, lobbyists, government entities, filings, contracts comparisons, issue mappings, text analysis, and revolving-door records.

source

data model

Canonical entity and edge universe

Stage 02 writes the canonical entity and edge universe. Later stages derive issue profiles, embeddings, graph metrics, communities, gap leads, and revolving-door vectors from that shared base rather than from disconnected tables.

model

gravity model

UMAP, Louvain, KDE, and gap score

UMAP gives the 2D issue space, Louvain finds graph communities, and spending-weighted KDE is compared against entity-count density. A high gap score means high money with a thinner organized community, not proof of capture.

analysis

map surface

V3_Epistemic/output/reliable_influence_map.html

The repository's active static map artifact loads chunked frontend payloads: scene_payload.json, search_index.json, adjacency_topk.json, and frontend_manifest.json.

Three.js

release command

python -m V3_Epistemic.pipeline.cli run --strict

The canonical strict run uses --raw-dir "Raw Data" and --out-dir V3_Epistemic/data, then validates reliable outputs, frontend manifest paths, and strict pipeline validation before release.

Python

What the animation is showing.

The animation is an explanation layer for the project, not a substitute for the full map.

The hero visual compresses two things: the completed Think Tanks DC transparency surface and the RDL issue-space graph. It shows how sources become records, records become canonical entities, and entities become searchable relationships with visible uncertainty.

Revolving-door arcs represent resolved career-transition records. Node size reflects observed spend or filing volume where available, while government nodes use target-side lobbying exposure rather than agency spending.

Reports, artifacts, and public context.

public essay

Why I Mapped Washington's Money

The LinkedIn post explains the intellectual arc from Think Tanks DC to the RDL/DC Epistemic Gravity Map, including the self-audit that corrected the funding label.

open post

uploaded report

Google Drive report

A fuller report and visual context file for the Washington money-mapping work. Public access is controlled by Google Drive.

open report

release report

PUBLIC_RELEASE_CERTIFICATE.md

Records the certified public surface, the latest known checks, the static map and payload files, and the caveats that govern public interpretation.

release notes

How to read it responsibly.

The release caveats are part of the product, not a footnote under it.

The map is exploratory and correlational. A high gap score means high money and lower organized community density in the modeled space; it does not prove influence, causality, intent, coordination, corruption, or wrongdoing.

Government target-side exposure is not government spending. Revolving-door records are transition records or events unless deduplication proves unique people. The 2025 slice remains partial unless refreshed source exports and validation reports say otherwise.

For policy systems that need inspectable evidence.

Reach out for public-interest research tooling, map-based policy explanation, or reproducible analysis workflows.

mumerzafer@gmail.com