Common Cause of Pennsylvania has launched a new web site and blog, Our Philadelphia, to educate the public about elected officials. Unlike many states, Pennsylvania has no limits on campaign contributions, and the online contribution databases maintained by the state and by the City of Philadelphia are barely usable with much of the data not available at all. A search for contributions that would take minutes in a more transparent state, like Maryland, would take hundreds of hours in Pennsylvania. So Common Cause is building its own web site and database to make this data available. But wait, there’s more. The site will include several features:
- Elected Officials lookups – enter an address and find your representatives as well as a list of their top contributors [we’re excited that this lookup service is powered by our Cicero API
- Campaign Contribution database
- Election Reform advocacy – including redistricting, campaign finance and ethics
- Open Government and Transparency advocacy
- City and State Government watchdog – with a diminished print media, there is an increasing need for other organizations to supplement the normal role of newspapers
Over the next year, Common Cause/PA hopes to add additional information for Pittsburgh as well as extend the contribution databases as well as its ability to report on government activities.
I wanted to share a quick note that we launched RedistrictingTheNation.com today.
Redistricting the Nation allows the public to:
- Enter their address (nation-wide) and view the “shape” of their federal, state, and local election districts.
- Learn who is in charge of drawing the boundaries of their election districts (e.g., independent commissions or elected representatives).
- Compare the “compactness” scores of their election district to other, similar districts (less compact and unusually shaped districts are more likely to be gerrymandered).
- Draw new district boundaries on a map and generate compactness scores for the new district.
RedistrictingTheNation.com Screenshot
With the 2010 Census and subsequent reapportionment and redistricting fast approaching, the Cicero team has been plugging away on an updated version of the Gerrymandering white paper and a companion website (keep your eyes peeled for more news). A key part of this process has been an expansion of the metrics used to measure district compactness, which is often used as a proxy to assess the extent of gerrymandering.
As we’ve run the calculations over the past few months, the members of the team have cultivated a sense of mixed horror and wonderment at the feats of contorted district drawing achieved at every legislative level. We’ll frequently send images or call colleagues over as we come across particularly astonishing examples. Most of our analysis has been conducted in ArcMap, supplemented with some of the great tools in the ET GeoWizards plugin. Once we have identified polygons of geometrically low compactness, we overlay the district boundaries on a base map to see how they correspond to the physical geography of the area.
One of my personal favorites has long been U.S. House District 4 in Illinois, based on the shape of the area alone. Imagine my surprise when I took a look at the district in context and discovered that the town of Cicero lies smack dab in the heart of the district. What a strange coincidence and incongruity that the Roman statesman who serves as the namesake of our elected official lookup application has also lent his name to a city in one of the strangest-looking legislative districts in the country.
We’ve decided to take this as a sign that fates of the two Ciceros are set to coincide: we hope that the tools provided by Azavea’s Cicero API and on our forthcoming Redistricting the Nation website can facilitate public engagement through a transparent and open process that brings fair districting to every part of the country.
Directions Magazine’s All Points Blog notes that Google has a new data API in a closed beta test. There aren’t a lot of details except what Adena notes in her blog entry. It will be a web API for reading and writing spatial data. Like the other Google API’s we can probably expect it to support:
- Storage
- Points, lines and polygons
- Attributes
- Indexable
- Searchable
- Client libraries in Java, C#, PHP, etc.
Of course, Google doesn’t announce anything until it’s released, but supposedly we can expect something in the next month. How is this relevant to Azavea? We will likely take a look at this as soon as it’s released and consider it as a low cost way to store and retrieve our growing library of polygon data used by our Cicero API. A lot will depend, however, on the specific features of the Google Maps Data API as well as license terms and performance.
UPDATE 4/19/2009: Google has released the new API at Where 2.0 this week. Querying the data looks like it’s limited to a feature ID, so we couldn’t use this for any spatial queries yet, but as a spatially enabled data repository, it looks very promising. And if Google adds some basic spatial query capabilities, it will be a compelling environment for hosting basic vector mapping capabilities.
We’ve been running a free public lookup service based on our Cicero API for the past year or so. It enabled people to enter an address in the U.S., Canada, Australia and New Zealand and display the elected officials that represented them. We’ve been working on an updated version and launched it on Friday. This new version adds some features and highlights some of the changes we’ve made to Cicero in the past year including:
- Watershed boundaries for the U.S. at the HUC-2, HUC-4, HUC-6 and HUC-8 levels
- County boundaries for the U.S.
- School district boundaries for the U.S.
- New cities
- We’ve changed our map boundary display services to that it can be more easily mashed up with GoogleMaps, Microsoft Virtual Earth, ArcGIS Server or other web mapping systems. We’ve also added transparency, color and boundary styling control.
- Changed the layout so it’s easier to read and will display faster
- Did some re-skinning of the graphic design
And we are adding more data all the time. We’re currently at almost 10,000 legislative boundaries, more than 11,000 elected officials and almost 15,000 non-legislative boundaries (watersheds, police districts, etc.) I’m pretty excited about the new public version of Cicero and we are continuing to think about new ways we can enhance the data and highlight capabilities of the API. Do you have ideas? What’s the next city, state or country we should add? Are there other features we should add to the API or the Live verson? Check it out and let us know.
Screenshot of Cicero Live
Chris Wilson at Slate.com had an article today on a gerrymandering discussion at a recent joint meeting of the American Mathematical Society and the Mathematical Association of America. The meeting was a discussion of various algorithmic approaches to redistricting that would minimize gerrymandering. As a citizen of one of the most gerrymandered cities in the U.S. it’s a topic near and dear to my heart.
There were some really interesting approaches that we hadn’t considered in Azavea’s original gerrymandering white paper, but perhaps the most interesting to me was a proposal by Sam Hirsch, an attorney at Jenner and Block, for a open competitive process. I’ve always thought that a game-like piece of software that would enable the public to develop and submit plans for scoring based on an objective set of metrics would be a way to both engage the public and have the added educational value of teaching people about geography of politics. Hirsch has actually written up an open, competitive process (sans game-like software) into a model constitutional amendment for states. Hirsch’s plan calls for a basic set of metrics that must be met before a plan can be submitted and then a set of additional measurements (county integry, partisan fairness and competitiveness) by which each plan would be measured. Any submitted plan would have to score higher on these metrics than the previous best plan to be accepted. At the end of the process, the highest scoring plan would be the winner. An approach like this would create the kind of transparent but competitive atmosphere that would probably result in strong public engagement as well as lively debate.
