Azavea announces the public release of its “Philadelphia Election Results, 1992-2008” web-based application (proceed anonymously if you do not wish to register). The application runs on Avencia’s Kaleidocade Indicators Framework (KIF), which enables users to visualize, interpret, and map large datasets. In the case of the “Philadelphia Election Results, 1992-2008” application, the dataset includes over 4 million records and holds the results of elections held in Philadelphia for all state and national offices from 1992 to 2008, along with the results of the 2007 elections for city offices, both at the precinct and the ward levels.

All across the blogosphere and tweetscape, people have been crying out for transparency, open government, and easy access to legislative data. The Obama Administration has pledged to create a more transparent and connected democracy. A major part of this initiative involves making government data and research available on the soon-to-be-launched website Data.gov. Legislators and government officials have been preparing for this change by soliciting advice from the tech citizenry on the best (and coolest) ways to distribute bulk data to the public...

Through our CiceroAPI twitter feed, we are participating in 140 character discussions on issues around redistricting, transparency, open government data, local elections data, even the cost of plane tickets on Southwest Airlines (you never know what you're going to get on Twitter!).

The Cicero team has just added Berkeley City Council to our local-level elected official lookup offerings.

"MAPLight.org, a nonpartisan, nonprofit research group, collaborated with Avencia Inc. to generate an extensive series of maps for MAPLight.org's "Remote Control" report, which shows the connection between money, geography and politics. The maps provide information on the geographic origin of contributions to members of the U.S. House of Representatives. Maps are created to demonstrate the source of funding at the congressional district level of both in-district and out-of-district campaign contributions from 2005-2007. Robert Cheetham, president of Avencia, answered our questions."