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:

• How these acts break the internet: http://fightforthefuture.org/pipa/
• Tim O’Reilly on the subject: https://plus.google.com/107033731246200681024/posts/5Xd3VjFR8gx
• Cato Institute on SOPA:  http://www.cato-at-liberty.org/sopa-an-architecture-for-censorship/
• EFF on specific problems: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/01/how-pipa-and-sopa-violate-white-house-principles-supporting-free-speech

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

• Find your rep’s contact info:  http://www.azavea.com/products/cicero/live-demo/
• Google Petition:  https://www.google.com/landing/takeaction/
• Electronic Frontier Foundation:  http://eff2.salsalabs.com/o/9042/images/stop-the-internet-blacklist.html

Sincerely,

Robert

• City of the Year: Runners-up (tie): Chicago, Philadelphia
• Best Government/Citizen Collaboration: OpenDataPhilly (yeah!)
• Best Use of Open Source: Runner-up: DistrictBuilder (woohoo!)
• Best Open Data Platform: OpenDataPhilly (woot!)
• Best Civic Start-up: Runner-up: ElectNext (a Philadelphia firm)
• Best Use of Social Media: Runners-up (tie): Williamson County, TX, Philadelphia
• Best Transit App: ReRoute.it / Runner-up: Septa.mobi (Philadelphia resident, Code for America fellow and former Azavean, Aaron Ogle, worked on ReRoute.it and the Code for America team as well as some of the Azavea staff worked on Septa.mobi)
• Best Social Services App: Sheltr (developed at Random Hacks of Kindness Philly in December)

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

Fix Philly Districts was a collaborative effort between several local organizations:  WHYY NewsWorks, the Philadelphia Daily News, Philly.com and Penn Project for Civic Engagement.  While the DistrictBuilder software has been used to support competitions in Virginia and Arizona, this Philadelphia implementation was the first time it was being used for a municipal public redistricting competition.

The competition ran for only a few weeks in August, but we were overwhelmed by the degree of engagement by the public.  We had participants from all over the United States, and almost 500 people registered to use the application.  More than 1,200 plans were started, and more than 70 complete plans were submitted to the leaderboards.  The final competition garnered submissions from 31 teams or individuals.  Representatives from each of the partners reviewed these plans and selected several winners.

But there are larger questions here.  In particular, was this worthwhile?  Did it have an impact?  To answer that question, let’s look at where we started.

The Contest

In the last three rounds of redistricting, Philadelphia has developed progressively more convoluted and gerrymandered districts with the process after the 2000 census resulting in two districts there were among the least compact local municipal districts in the United States (check out our Redistricting White Paper and Philadelphia Supplement if you want to read more about how that was determined) and redistricting had historically been carried out behind closed doors.  This past spring both the Mayor Michael Nutter and City Council committed to a more open process and promised at least four public hearings to be held in the neighborhoods that would be most impacted.  But by early August, there were no hearings scheduled and the new district plan was due on September 9.

We launched Fix Philly Districts on August 3 and within days, City Council announced a public hearing … to be held at City Hall… in the morning… on a weekday… in August.  There wasn’t much chance that was going to result in much airing of opinions from the public.  But that did not mean the public wasn’t interested.  On Monday, August 8, our partners held a civic workshop event at WHYY.  More than 120 people showed up – it was standing room only.  Two members of Council (Sanchez and Green) attended and, to their credit, stayed through the entire event, both participating and contributing ideas for how to improve the redistricting process.  Ms. Sanchez was particularly supportive and offered to make time for the winners of the contest to present their plans at a future hearing.

Many news media outlets took Council to task for not providing more opportunities for public participation in the process.  Two more hearings were scheduled, this time in the neighborhoods and in the evening so that it would be easier for people to attend.  Azavea presented a sampling of the Fix Philly Districts submissions at the first event and the winners presented their own plans at the second event.

Council Releases a Plan

Council announced two slight variations on a plan on September 9, only a day after the second of the neighborhood hearings.  Both of the proposed plans are improvements on what we have had in Philadelphia for the past 10 years.  Both of these plans got a few things right:

• The two most egregiously gerrymandered districts are much improved, resulting in a plan that is somewhat more compact
• There is a more compact and identifiable Latino district
• There is a more recognizable set of “river wards” along the Delaware River

On the other hand, these plans do not come close to the standard set by the Fix Philly Districts competitors.  Some of the craziness includes:

• The 5th District still leaps across Broad Street and deep into the east side of town – this is clearly designed to simply incorporate Darrell Clarke’s home into his district, but significantly fragments the neighborhoods east of Broad St.
• The 5th District dips deep into Center City to capture Rittenhouse Square, Spring Garden and Fairmount neighborhoods.  This is entirely unnecessary and significantly fragments the neighborhoods NW of center city
• The 1st District spans the natural barrier of the Schuylkill River and ends up grouping SW Philadelphia with South Philadelphia, sections of the City that have little in terms of common interests
• The 3rd District dips down into the SW
• The 8th District has an appendage on its east edge that seems odd

These are strange moves, except in light of where the incumbents live.  Council developed a somewhat better plan, but it essentially remains an incumbency protection plans.  I am also surprised (though perhaps not that much) that the two plans represent almost identical concepts with only a few divisions moved around in each.  These aren’t really choices that would enable the public to have a real debate.

Did we have an impact?

This isn’t a typical Azavea project: there is no funding to support it; all of the partners did the work pro bono; and while our Cicero API and the work we’ve done on DistrictBuilder is clearly engaged with the geographic elements of the democratic process, Azavea does not usually wade into the actual scrum of politics.  Was it worth it?  Did we really have an impact?

Our ultimate goal would be to change the rules so that redistricting is taken out of City Council’s hands – I strongly believe that an independent redistricting process  is the only way to ensure a fair and transparent process that reflects the public’s interests, rather than Council members’ interests. But we were not so naive as to believe that was going to happen.  Did we change the way that Council acted or change the outcome of the redistricting process?  I think we did.  With some help from active coverage by the news media, we at least accomplished the following:

• We shamed Council into scheduling first one public hearing and then two more, enabling many more voices to be heard.
• Council delivered a plan that was not completely embarrassing and did so on time.

So City Council didn’t produce an embarrassing plan, and that’s a victory?  I actually think we did much more.   We successfully demonstrated that, given some online tools, there are hundreds of people that are sufficiently interested in the redistricting process to commit hours of their time to drawing their own districts plans.  And they did that in the middle of August, during a hurricane, several storms, an earthquake and anxiety about the Phillies.  The best ten or so of the plans submitted to the contest were better than what Council developed from many perspectives.  And I do believe that the scrutiny probably prevented some of the excesses that we saw after the last census.

Not the end of the story

And I suspect this particular redistricting story will continue.  Council has adopted one of the two plans and the mayor has signed it, but there is nothing to prevent this one from being tweaked.  An amendment proposing additional changes has already been introduced, there will be five new district council members inaugurated in January all of whom will likely have their own ideas.  Indeed, this new plan will not actually be used until the election of 2015, providing lots of opportunities for fiddling.

But I think we can say doubt that the public process represented by the Fix Philly Districts contest demonstrates, without a doubt, that the many members of the public want to be engaged in a civic dialogue, both with their elected representatives and with each other.  They will work hard to do so.  And our democracy can be better for it.

I’m going to walk through some highlights of the event from my own perspective.  I’ve written a lot about OpenStreetMap in this blog, so it’s no secret that I’m a big fan of this project that sets out to create a shared and open map of the planet.  A lot has happened in the past year, but here are some of the things I saw as important or just plain cool:

• MapQuest and OSM – MQ has been a big contributor and user of OSM. They are working on new quality assessment software tools and hope to release them to the community soon.  This will help to highlight the major swaths of the US, in particular, where the data needed for routing and geocoding needs to be fixed.
• Bing and OSM – Steve Coast did an overview of Bing contributions to OSM since he joined Microsoft:
• Bing aerial imagery – Bing has agreed to share its high quality aerial imagery with the OSM community. This is a big deal, as it will enable more mapping to be done without physically traveling to a site and Bing’s imagery is much higher quality than was previously available to the community
• DetectRoad API – deriving street vector data from Bing aerial imagery
• Windows Phone 7 OSM Editor – the MS Bing folks are working on this
• Frontdoor Addressing – a free and open app to move points that were geocoded to the rooftops of residences to the front door.  150 million records.  Microsoft has agreed to share all results with OpenStreetMap under the OSM Open Data license.
• ArcGIS and OSM – Esri continues to invest in tools for editing and using OSM data.  The ArcGIS OSM Editor was upgraded in the spring to version 1.1 and Esri is working on version 2, which was just released in beta.  Some new directions Esri is taking include:
• Overall objective is to add support for OSM throughout Esri stack.
• Initial objective is to add support for publishing OSM through ArcGIS Server, including support of editing via the Javascript API.
• OSM in Japan - two presentations by Daniel Kastl on the history of OSM in Japan; challenges specific to the Japanese language, addressing systems and urban structure; and use of OSM for earthquake/tsunami response and recovery.  Nostalgia for me as I recognized all of the unique and wonderful things about living in Japan.
• Mapnik – David Zwarg told me about a lightning talk about Mapnik2, which he says “has TONS of awesome features”
• Gameification – Peter Batty pointed to the need for a more game-ified OSM editing experience that might bring in a larger audience of editors.  I think there is a lot to be said for this.  There was an ad hoc session on Sunday focused on this question and the potential for a game-like user experience to potentially expand the OpenStreetMap community but also to potentially negatively affect data quality.
• Walking Papers – Michel Migurski (Stamen Design) summarized recent work on his Walking Papers project to a standing-room-only crowd, including interesting applications of Astrometry algorithms to geolocating map images taken from phones.  Other highlights include support for multiple languages, atlas (cutting up a scene into 4-up, 16-up, etc.) and tweaks that support other audiences (crisis mappers, educators and museums).
• Migurski followed up this performance on Sunday with a rousing plea to make creating and using OSM data a lot easier.  I have to admit, if you are new to the OSM community figuring out how to either use or contribute is daunting.
• Cool Tools I Didn’t Know About
• TopOSM - OSM maps overlaid on topographic elevation maps
• Cartagr.am
• Acetate - attractive stylesheets for data visualization
• TileStache - renders vector and raster tiles from contemporary map sources – think of it as a next generation TileCache
• ImpOSM – next generation importer for OSM data
• Cascadenik – cascading stylesheets for working with Mapnik

In April the City of Philadelphia, NPower PA, Technically Philly and Azavea launched OpenDataPhilly.org, a catalog of open data sets, applications and APIs available from the City and other organizations in the region. It includes raw data sets, data-centric applications and APIs that are openly available on the web. Since the launch of OpenDataPhilly, Azavea has continued to add new data sets and applications. At the same time we all have been working to build a broader constituency of users and groups that support open data policies by the City and has the potential to actually leverage and use the data once it’s released.

Why?  One of our core principles is to do work that is meaningful and encourages positive changes in the communities our clients serve.  Welcoming Tyreek amongst us seemed like a tangible and meaningful, albeit small, way to make a positive impact in the life of someone from our community.  During one of our Management Team meetings, I presented the idea and we all voted unanimously that Tyreek should join us for his internship.  This is his account of his stay with us.  It is my hope Tyreek will remain in touch with us.  We all wish him the best as he prepares to apply to college and develops his professional career.

“Though I was only here for six weeks, these six weeks were some of the most wonderful six weeks, I have had in my entire life.  My internship with Azavea was amazing, everyone in the office was kind, helping, and just plain, awesome.  I have never seen a place so vibrant, everyone is almost always busy working with something but when you go and ask them something there is never a bad atmosphere about them.  Each week I was assigned a different team and a different assignment, and as a result more insight on what Azavea had to offer.

The first week I worked with the Law Enforcement team, consisting of Bennet, Jeremy, and Kenny, as a beta tester, using a demo of their HunchLab product to find any problems or bugs in the software.  I greatly enjoyed the application as well as the way they explained things to me.  HunchLab is a web-based geographic crime visualization, early warning, and risk forecasting software.  HunchLab and the team developing it were so great that at the end of the week I reluctantly had to go.

But the fun did not stop there, the next week was the Cicero team, with Abby, Andrew, and Daniel.  During my week with Cicero, which is an address-based legislative district matching and elected official look up web API, I gathered and entered data about previous elections for various countries.  That was definitely a challenge, an interesting challenge, considering how little is known about a lot of old elections for a lot of countries.

The next week I was placed with the PhillyHistory / Sajara team, which consists of Deborah and Carissa.  PhillyHistory.org offers a geographic search, mapping and display of historic assets in Philadelphia.  This was also one of my favorite weeks because I really enjoyed surfing through all the historic photos they had of the city I live in.  The entire week was spent with me going through the pictures and recording data, but the pictures I saw made me feel closer to Philadelphia.

The next week I worked with the DecisionTree team helping them install Ubuntu, which was awesome and gave me a feel for Ubuntu and an OS other than the Windows or Mac OS X.   I really enjoyed how Tamara,  Josh and Erik, let me get a feel for the software and the OS on my own but were there to help me when I stumbled or, was stuck.

My last week, I was with the Land Records team and worked on their PWD Stormwater Billing Application.  Though I knew very little about the application it was still fun.  I was assigned with the task to find ways to break or hack the web app so they could fix it.  Matthew and Justin were extremely helpful when it came to parts of software that I found that did not work or had some bugs.

Overall my time here at Azavea was a great one and I wish I could do it again.  Everyone was approachable and reasonable, but I would like to personally thank Ms. Rachel, because my stay there was twice as wonderful because of her.  She always made sure I had what I needed, if I needed more of anything, if I was making out okay, and if there was ever anything that she herself could not help me with she tried hard to find someone that could.” – Tyreek Elam

This isn’t a typical Azavea project: there is no funding to support it – all of the partners are doing the work pro bono; and while our Cicero API and the work we’ve done on DistrictBuilder is clearly engaged with the geographic elements of the democratic process, Azavea does not usually wade into the actual scrum of politics.

So, why get involved?  In 2006, using our Cicero database of global legislative districts, Azavea released the results of an internal research project on legislative district compactness in the form of a Gerrymandering White Paper.  In 2010 we released a revised version of the research, this time in the context of the 2010 Census and the 2011 redistricting process.  Both studies revealed that Azavea’s home town, Philadelphia, has some of the most contorted local council districts in the United States. We want to leverage the DistrictBuilder software we’ve been creating over the past year to make a contribution toward changing this poor showing.

In Philadelphia, the redistricting process is controlled by City Council.  We believe that the best government is one in which citizens are engaged in the democratic process, and drawing the lines that determine how our representatives will be elected is a critical part of this process.  We have created FixPhillyDistricts.com to both enable the public to learn about redistricting and to encourage public engagement in the process.  The effort is also meant to demonstrate that an open, public process based upon objective criteria can produce fair, legal council districts in Philadelphia.

How can you help?  Take a few minutes to visit FixPhillyDistricts.com.  From there you can do two things: 1) you can create an account and draw a Philadelphia City Council district plan (even if you don’t live in Philadelphia); and  2) using the social media buttons available on the site, help the Fix Philly Districts partners tell other civic-minded organizations, researchers, and members of the public that web-based, collaborative and public redistricting is a reality that can be implemented in other cities, counties, and states.  Together, we can redraw the map on redistricting.

Key Dates for Fix Philly Districts Competition

• Wed, August 3, 2011 – Competition Opened
• Mon, August 8, 2011, 7pm – Public Workshop at WHYY – 150 N 6th St – RSVP to 215-898-1112 or LindaBre@gse.upenn.edu
• Thurs, August 11, 2011, 6:30pm – DistrictBuilder Training Webinar – Register
• Sun, August 28, 2011, 11:59pm – Competition Ends
• Early September (TBD) – Winners Announced

More about Fix Philly Districts

We are really encouraged by the amount of press coverage the project has already received. You can see a roundup of local coverage in the Azavea News Room.

More about DistrictBuilder

DistrictBuilder, the software that powers the Fix Philly Districts site, was developed in collaboration with leading redistricting experts at the Public Mapping Project.  It is open source, which means that the software is transparent and available to anyone to build their own redistricting web site. Azavea folks are also available should you be interested in an online redistricting project in your area. In collaboration with the Public Mapping Project, we will be continuing to add new features and capabilities over the next several months.

• 10% time for personal research projects, training or open source projects
• Pro bono spatial analysis mini-projects for non-profit organziations
• Quarterly R&D social
• Monthly R&D code sprint day
• Monthly brown bag lunches

While we have had the 10% research program for several years, some staff found it difficult to carve out the time to work on research projects.  So last fall, we started setting aside one day a month where there is both explicit social permission and peer pressure to invest in research projects.  We also align this day with our long-running Brown Bag Lunch events.

The day starts with a stand-up meeting attended by the whole company.  Each person with a research project says a brief word on what their goals are for the day.  Robert then provides a summary of major accomplishments for the past month and priorities for the coming month.  Around noon, food arrives and we gather to listen to a lunch-time speaker.  Brown bag lunches are an opportunity for either an Azavea colleague to talk about a personal project they are developing outside of work or to invite someone from outside the company to talk about a project about which they are passionate.  These presentations have included an incredible range of folks including:

• The fight to save the S.S. United States
• The development of a new documentary, Philadelphia: The Great Experiment
• The latest research from people like Dennis Culhane, Amy Hillier, Doug Wiebe, Dana Tomlin, Joel Caplan and Charlie Branas
• Introduction to Fencing from a local maestro
• Robots and GIS, Benton Yetman from PenBay Media
• What I learned working for the 2008 Obama campaign (Josh Marcus)
• Philadelphia Sesquicentennial (Deb Boyer)
• Hand Drawn Maps Association, Kristofer Harzinski

Azavea will be blogging about these monthly events beginning with a summary of our March presentation by Thaddeus Squire of CultureWorks Greater Philadelphia.  Stay tuned.