A great example is the WHYY NewsWorks project, a fusion of traditional reporting from experienced journalists, crowdsourced data collection and story telling from readers and citizen journalists, and powerful data visualizations from technologists.  WHYY made a big move into the world of online journalism with the launch of NewsWorks in November 2010.  As a NewsWorks technology partner, Azavea developed a community mapping tool called Civic Atlas.  Civic Atlas allows NewsWorks’ readers to search for thousands of community assets across the region, including social service organizations, educational organizations, schools, daycare centers, and more.  ”Civic Altas helps put community assets and community news in a collaborative context,” says Carissa Brittain, one of the software developers at Azavea who worked on the project.  “News is always about the where, but knowing what else is around, and what else is going on nearby, can also be very useful.”  An upcoming feature of Civic Altas, she adds, “is to bring community members’ stories about a place or an organization into a larger shared space — a public map of local news.”

Civic Atlas was constructed using a number of freely available software building blocks, including: the DoJo toolkit for the user interface, the Open Layers mapping library, the PostgreSQL database  to store the community asset data, and GeoServer to share layers of transportation data.  The project also uses tools from Azavea’s Common Libraries, including a data aggregator that clusters community assets on the map based on the extent of a search area and the distance between assets.

The community asset data, collected by the staff at DVAEYC, the Delaware Valley Association for the Education of Young Children, was originally part of a service called Connect 211, built by Azavea in 2008.  The project was looking for a new home right around the time Chris Satullo, Director of News and Civic Engagement at WHYY, was beginning plans for NewsWorks.  By mid-2010, Satullo had enthusiastically adopted the mapping tool, renaming it Civic Atlas and making it a key feature of NewsWorks.

This is not Azavea’s first time partnering with journalists.  Reporters at The Oregonion have been using the Cicero API in their political coverage since the 2008 election.  Journalists from the Daily News, City Paper, and the Philadelphia Inquirer have used Azavea’s maps to tell stories about topics as diverse as redistricting, property foreclosures, and walkability.  This October, Azavea staff participated in conversations about the future of online journalism at the Online News Association conference in Washington DC.  Both print and online journalists have been particularly interested in our Redistricting the Nation project, which was created in 2009 to help citizens visualize the shape of political districts and understand the process of redistricting.

Azavea’s Megan Heckert and I participated in a re-imagining of Philadelphia’s vacant land during the Greening the Post-Industrial City conference, held at the Academy of Natural Sciences in late April. The conference, sponsored by Drexel University’s Engineering Cities Initiative, brought together stakeholders from the government, academic, nonprofit, and business worlds to discuss the future of Philadelphia’s landscape.

The topics of conversation ranged from reclaiming brownfields for industrial reuse, to transforming vacant residential lots into community gardens and farms, to rediscovering and redeveloping underused transit hubs throughout the city. A great many attendees were also extremely interested in one of our colleagues’ — Aaron Ogle — research project on mapping walkability in the city.

Left: Palmer Park. Right: Southwark Gardens. Beneath: Vacant Lot. Photos by Dana Bauer

Nearly all the speakers and panelists emphasized the importance of finding sustainable solutions to the problem of vacant land — solutions that are eco-friendly, promote economic growth, and address the concerns and interests of community members. A crucial part of the process, said keynote speaker Mark Alan Hughes, the Mayor’s (former) Director of Sustainability, is developing mechanisms for accountability, including web-based tools that allow citizens to view and track public investment in redevelopment.

Throughout the conference, Megan and I listened to the ideas and goals of the stakeholders and explored ways GIS, mapping technologies, and data visualization could facilitate the re-imaging of idle lands and make Philadelphia a better, greener place.

Here at Azavea we’ve been talking about CNN’s Magic Wall, a tour de force in election information visualization. With nerdy glee, correspondent John King brings to viewers the spatial drama of the presidential race, sweeping his hands across the Magic Wall (an oversized monitor powered by dozens of live data feeds) to highlight swing states, break down demographic data, and tabulate possible combinations of electoral votes.

For the past few years, we’ve been hard at work developing our own election tools and services, albeit on a smaller scale and with a focus on state and local elections. But our mission is grand: put the power of GIS and mapping into the hands of voters, grassroots campaign workers, and watchdog organizations.

Map displaying dispersment of campaign contribution sources to a state legislator.

Cicero , Azavea’s legislative district boundary and elected official web API, is a field guide to the geography of democracy. Cicero connects citizens to their local, state, and national representatives by tapping into a massive database of voting district maps and information about politicians, legislative bodies, and election events. The Cicero database has launched dozens of projects designed to help voters understand our current political landscape, including a study of gerrymandering in the United States, an analysis of in-district vs. out-of-district campaign donations, an election day lookup tool that provides users with constantly updated vote tallys, and Comcast’s Your Local Politics website.

To help grassroots campaigns hit the ground running, we’ve developed tools to quickly generate hundreds of canvassing maps that pinpoint likely voters and supervoters in each precinct. We’ve used our DecisionTree web-based geographic planning and prioritization tool to build a prototype Elections and Advocacy application to enable campaigns to prioritize canvassing and get-out-the-vote (GOTV) efforts based on a selection of over 30 weighted electoral indicators including voting history, demographic data, and civic participation.

Map of election-day incidents that occurred in Philadelphia during the April 2008 primaries.

This November, we will continue to work with the Committee of Seventy, one of the oldest non-partisan political watchdog groups in the U.S., tracking election-day incidents – everything from voter intimidation to faulty equipment – at polling places throughout Philadelphia County. We launched this project last year during the mayoral race using PDF maps that were updated throughout the day. This year we built a real-time interactive web application that displays maps of election incidents as they are reported on screens at Committee of Seventy headquarters – our own version of a magic wall, if you will.