Jan 18, 2012

Azavea web blackout in protest of SOPA and PIPA

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Friends of Azavea –

Today Azavea will be joining other technology firms and blacking out our web sites in order to protest pending legislation in the U.S. Congress, specifically the PIPA and SOPA acts.  We have never shut down our web site.  We are a business, and our web site and blogs are an important way that we communicate with people about our work.  So we do not make this decision lightly.  But we believe that nothing less than civil liberties and the dynamic ecosystem of the Internet is at stake.

There has been a fair amount of reporting on the potential impact of the PIPA (in the Senate) and the SOPA (in the House of Representatives), so I will not go into detail about the contents of the proposed laws.  But I will say that in an effort to combat piracy of movies, music and other digital content, these acts threaten to undermine our basic civil liberties; institute far-reaching censorship without due process; stifle technology innovation; place a heavy burden on current and future web companies; encourage the censorship activities in China, Iran and other states; and undermine the very architecture of the Internet.

The organizations in favor of these laws are the movie, music and other content development industries.  We believe those businesses have a right to exist.  Further, we believe they should continue to develop compelling material and make money from those creations.  We also believe that theft of that copyright material is wrong.  But we do not agree that preventing that theft is justification for imposing censorship, circumventing due process, or undermining the architecture of the Internet.  There are targeted ways to shut down foreign websites that service pirated material without asking American companies to censor the Internet.

Private and non-profit firms have all taken stands in the past for one political position or another.  They circulate petitions and raise money for candidates.  Shucks, we help them, with services like our Cicero API.  But we think this situation is different.  We believe the very fabric of our democracy is at risk.  We agree with Cory Doctorow, that the internet is not some kind of “glorified form of cable TV”, but the emerging nervous system of a connected planet, and we undermine it at our collective risk.

After today, there will be howls of protest.  People will cry that the technology companies are circumventing the democratic process by leveraging their platforms to incite mass protest.  But the companies that support these acts are entertaining members of Congress, hiring their staff, and donating to their campaigns.  We ask for none of those things.  Rather, we ask that you participate as a citizen and call, write, or email your congressional representatives and express your opinion.  Even if you disagree with our stance, you will strengthen our democracy by raising your voice.

If you are interested in learning more about this issue, here are some resources:

If you are interested in registering your voice, here are some places to do so:

Sincerely,

Robert

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Dec 25, 2011

Cicero is Tracking Legislative Boundary Data and Schedules FOR You

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As newly approved redistricted legislative district boundary plans are released our spatial analysis team has been running compactness analysis on each one (see Daniel McGlone’s recent blog on his analysis of the approved PA congressional boundaries – http://www.azavea.com/blogs/atlas/2011/12/pennsylvania-congressional-redistricting-we-have-a-plan/). Our growing collection of official, state-approved legislative district boundaries is not just tickling our intellectual fancy – We are also methodically adding the new boundary files to our Cicero API data collection and making it available through a new call we’ve recently added to the API.

This new call has proven to be a big hit with organizations wanting to preemptively match their constituents to the districts they will belong to when the new district boundaries take effect.  This enables organizations to prepare their constituent databases for rapid call-to-action campaigns directed at new legislatures, analyze their constituents by districts for the next election cycle, and more.

To use the GeocodingService or MapGeneration service to access newly drawn districts based on the 2010 census:

  • Simply append the suffix “_2010″ to the DistrictType parameter in any method (for example, you would use the DistrictType NATIONAL_LOWER_2010 to see the new House districts and STATE_UPPER_2010 to see new State Senate districts).
  • ALL_2010 will return all the new districts available for any given location.
  • If new districts are not yet available for a given location, the SOAP response will not return district responses for the location.

We are tracking when each state’s new legislature officially takes office (in the majority of cases, this is when the new boundaries take effect). As each state takes office, we will be moving the 2010 boundaries to the current boundary dataset.  In other words, keep using the DistrictType calls the way you are using them now and we will do the updating work for you!

New states will continue to be added as we receive and process the data.

Questions?  Feel free to contact us: http://www.azavea.com/products/cicero/contact/

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Dec 20, 2011

GovFresh Awards Announced – DistrictBuilder and OpenDataPhilly are Winners!

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GovFresh 2011 logoThe Annual GovFresh awards for civic technology were announced today, and I’m proud to announce that a couple of Azavea projects (and several other Philadelphia efforts) were among the recipients.  The awards (skipping the unrelated ones) included:

Congratulations to all of the award-winners.  While I think there were many cities nominated, among both the winners and top vote-getters in the public voting, I thought there were particularly strong showings for:

  • New York City
  • Austin
  • Chicago
  • Philadelphia
Are these the centers of civic innovation?

 

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Dec 19, 2011

Civic Commons Marketplace and Azavea’s Year in Open Source

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Civic Commons logo

Today is an exciting day for the civic technology community. Civic Commons is celebrating the public launch of its new Marketplace, and we are thrilled that some of our solutions have been listed alongside a broad range of compelling software projects.

I wrote up several of our commercial products (Hunchlab, Sajara, and Cicero) and open source solutions (DistrictBuilder and OpenTreeMap) and submitted to the Civic Commons Marketplace back in October, so it’s great to see the results made available to the public.

On a more personal level though, last week I finally completed a 77 page senior thesis for my undergraduate degree in “Growth and Structure of Cities” at Haverford College.  Entitled Programming Politics: Building an Open Government through Free and Open Source Software, in it I make the case that an element of the Open Government movement is (and should continue to be) Free and Open Source software. If we advocate for our governments to be open to new forms of digital civic engagement, release open data, and use open standards, but then we as citizens are only able to engage officials and analyze data with closed source code…is Open Government actually all that open?

In the same thesis, I also argue that the “software caucus” of the Open Government movement cannot achieve all its goals through the work of citizen-built open-source projects alone. Indeed, the Free and Open Source software movements have a long history of valuable stewardship by “corporate citizens” too.  Azavea is no stranger to contributing to open source projects, and I am proud to work at a company that blends its B Corporation social mission with a committed strategy of using and contributing back to the open source commons in its work, as well as an interest in being an active member of the local tech and non-tech communities in Philadelphia.

The Civic Commons Marketplace is not all about open source; and neither is Azavea. Both organizations, though, reflect strong commitments to building the same civic technology community:  the Marketplace in facilitating coordination and communication among its members, and Azavea in being an active member that gives back every chance we can.

This year, we have contributed a lot. In addition to sponsoring and attending a number of events, like the OSGeo Code Sprint(which we will be doing again in 2012), the OpenStreetMap State of the Map conference in Denver, and the FOSS4G conference, we announced a techSoup partnership giving free Cicero credits to nonprofits. Also, a bunch of Azavea staff contributed to several local hackathons like Apps For Septa and, just last weekend, Random Hacks of Kindness Philly.

Code for AmericaBefore the year started though, we had to give up one of our own: Aaron Ogle was accepted as a 2011 Code for America fellow. He was able to pay us a visit in February though, along with the rest of the CfA Philly team, when Azavea hosted Philly Data Camp at our offices – a one day hackathon on civic data. Gems like PhillyAPI came out of that event, itself an amalgam of work done by CfA fellow Max Ogden and another open source effort out of Portland, PDX API.

Our data hacking days were just beginning though. As part of Philly Tech Week in April, in what techPresident.com’s Nick Judd labeled as more than an open data portal but a real “open government community building exercise,” we jointly launched OpenDataPhilly.org with a number of partners. The public-private regional catalog attempts to be a community-supported clearinghouse of data, APIs, and apps submitted by nonprofit groups, government, businesses (like us!), and individual coders. We even open-sourced the platform behind it, Open-Data-Catalog, which was mentioned at a conference in Berlin and picked up by a group in Chattanooga, Tennessee.

In July, we open sourced another platform dealing with a specific kind of data:  trees. OpenTreeMap, which now powers PhillyTreeMap, Greenprint maps in Sacramento, CA, and the San Francisco Urban Forest Map, has made a splash in the community forestry community.

We put our coalition-building, data-gathering, and platform-building experience together in August and launched a Philly-specific implementation of DistrictBuilder (developed as open source, in collaboration with the Public Mapping Project) in a month long contest: FixPhillyDistricts.com. This project is near and dear to my heart, having served as an important case study in my Open Government thesis. With the press help of our partners WHYY, the Daily News, Technically Philly, and the Penn Project for Civic Engagement, over 400 users worked on and submitted 70 complete City Council district plans to our contest. City Council met its redistricting deadline on time (the first time in over 30 years), and didn’t produce a completely embarrassing result.

Open Data RaceHaving just finished the FixPhillyDistricts contest, the OpenDataPhilly team would launch the Open Data Race – bringing the contest model to open data for the first time.  A ton of nonprofits brainstormed and proposed new datasets they would like to see opened.  Several winners were announced at the end of October and now the OpenDataPhilly team is working with the City of Philadelphia to see those data sets released.

Which brings me back to the Civic Commons Marketplace release.  Civic Commons is an interesting organization. It’s a new non-profit that was started this year by Code for America and OpenPlans to promote the development and use of open platforms by government agencies.  The Marketplace is a catalog of software tools that solve specific problems for government.  On Day 1, there are already 193 apps.  We look forward to seeing this becoming a platform for matching government needs with useful software.  You can find listings for some of ours at:

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Dec 14, 2011

Pennsylvania Congressional Redistricting: We Have a Plan!

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After months of only rumors leaking out of the Pennsylvania Capitol about the redrawing of the state’s congressional districts, a map was finally released yesterday. It was supposed to be released last week. Then it was delayed until Monday. Then Tuesday. Then a PDF came out yesterday and the shapefile, which allows us to do a geographic analysis, early this morning. The Cicero team couldn’t wait to get our hands on it!

At first glance we were taken aback, most notably by District 7, which got more “Wow what is that?” remarks in the office than the earthquake. There is a lot to say about this monstrosity, certain to be a poster child for future gerrymandering studies. We’ve been able to perform some basic GIS analysis on the new districts today and will present some findings below. Next week, we’ll write about some of the methods used to create the numbers we are presenting.

First off, here’s the numbers you have been waiting for: compactness, demographics and voting tendency for the current and proposed congressional districts:

UPDATE 12/19/2011: We have added statistics for the Democratic congressional redistricting proposal:

As you can see, using both the Polsby-Popper and Schwartzberg methods of calculating district compactness (read up about how those are calculated by taking a look at our gerrymandering white paper), the proposed congressional districts are slightly less compact than the districts currently in effect. While that may not seem like a lot, keep in mind that Pennsylvania’s current districts are already some of the least compact in the nation, according to our study. District 7, represented by Patrick Meehan (R), takes the honor of having the eighth least compact congressional district in the nation. Of all the newly drawn congressional districts, it is the fifth least compact in the nation. Have a look for yourself:

» Continue Reading

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Dec 13, 2011

Webinar Recording: The Real-time Police Force

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Police agencies collect a wealth of data.   Every call for services and every incident of crime is captured and logged (and often automatically geocoded to a point in space).   Making sense of this wealth of data is critical to police agencies being led by intelligence and analysis and not simply putting cops out into the field haphazardly.

Most police forces have a process whereby this raw information is groomed into maps by a central crime analysis unit.   Determining where hotspots are present and describing  recent events is definitely useful, but how can we accelerate this process to adapt our analytic output in nearly real-time and then disseminate this information to the field?

The answer is by automating the flow of information.   We see this feature as a core strength within our product, HunchLab.   New information is automatically pulled into HunchLab through integration with police agencies computer aided dispatch (CAD) and records management systems (RMS).   This new information is then immediately incorporated into analytic output.     New incidents can trigger early warning alerts for spikes in activity or modify short-term risk assessment in a particular police district.   But it’s not just about consuming this information within HunchLab itself.    The system provides secure access to analytic output via APIs that can be integrated into other back-end applications, further analytic tools, and even mobile applications.

To learn more about our vision for the real-time police force, you can watch the webinar recording embedded below:

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Dec 10, 2011

All Kinds of Awesome at RHoK Philly

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RHoK logo

This is a brief followup on my note regarding Random Hacks of Kindness last weekend.  wanted to congratulate all of the people that were involved with the Random Hacks of Kindness event last weekend.  I was proud to see five people from Azavea there, including:
I think everyone ended up working on a different project, making important contributions on the following efforts:
  • Cost of Freedom – Geographic visualization of the cost of getting the IDs that are increasingly required in order to vote – a group of journalists making the case that these IDs are essentially a poll tax (poll taxes are illegal based on the Voting Rights Act of 1965)
  • Climate Data Aggregator – global climate change weather data lookups
  • N-Vox – Neighborhood Voice – prioritization add-on for the Change-by-Us project
  • Sheltr.org – a web and mobile “find near me” service for soup kitchens, shelters and food cupboards – source code is available at https://github.com/sheltr  This project won best of show and has continued to develop since RHOK.
  • Cuibono – coolest concept – use the microphone on your smart phone to listen to a political campaign ad, use a server natural language processing engine to determine which ad it is and then find information about the ad, in particular related to its truthiness.  If you’re curious what the name means, it’s here.
  • Hack2Unify – project to match skilled volunteers w/ needs
There is some more info at Technically Philly. I’m really proud of the hard work and compelling projects that came out of the Random Hacks event. I also want to give props to the sponsors:  Drexel University, Technically Philly, Voxeo Labs, Azavea (yeah!), Grindcore House, and Drexel’s Math and Computer Science Society.
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