One of the first social studies lessons I remember, from elementary school, was about representative democracy. (This was shortly after the lesson where I learned that Philadelphia is shaped like a woman’s head viewed in profile – think large bun and poofy bangs. But I digress.) In a representative democracy, we, the people, elect Representatives, who then represent our interests. This representation is based on geography. And yet, as we recently learned, it turns out that the situation is really not so simple. Legislators may be getting their votes from inside the districts they represent, but it turns out that the money that supports them often originates elsewhere. Why is it important? Because it means that elected officials who raised a majority of their campaign funds from outside their district, might end up having ties to a community that has not elected them. So what time and attention would these Representatives have left to address interests of the voters they represent?

This disparity was brought home quite concretely by our recent collaboration with MAPLight.org analyzing the geographic sources of campaign contributions to members of the U.S. House of Representatives. MAPLight.org is a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization that has assembled a vast public database to illuminate the connection between campaign donations and legislative votes (the acronym MAP stands for ‘Money and Politics’). Having heard of Azavea’s work on our Cicero™ legislative district boundary and elected official API, MAPLight.org approached us to assist with the mapping component of a study they were undertaking to analyze the geographic sources of campaign contributions to U.S. Representatives.

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

Before we could get to the mapping component, we had to first figure out the actual origins of nearly a million campaign contributions by geocoding them and locating them within congressional districts. In an effort to be as precise as possible, we chose to use only contributions that were matched at the address level. For all other contributions, we checked the Zip code for overlap with congressional districts. The creators of district boundaries, of course, do not take Zip codes into account when creating their districts, so this process left many contributions with two or three (and sometimes more) possible districts. Feeling optimistic, MAPLight.org chose to give the legislators the benefit of the doubt – if the ZIP code of the contribution overlapped at all with the congressional district, it was counted as an in-district contribution.

Percentage of funds raised from out-of-District for U.S. House members.

While MAPLight.org did the actual data analysis, the next step for Azavea was to find a way to visualize the results. The vision was to create a map for each Representative showing the relative amounts of contributions originating in each district across the country. But with 421 legislators in the study, creating each map by hand was not an option we were eager to pursue. Our first step was to take advantage of ESRI’s ModelBuilder, creating a model that would quickly update the map based on an input legislator. But while ModelBuilder is a great tool for automating geoprocessing tasks, it was only able to solve half of the problem – we also needed to export each map to an image file. For this, we turned to ESRI’s ArcView‘s built-in scripting capabilities using Visual Basic for Applications. By combining the two features, we were able to rapidly produce 421 maps for the report, and visually back up MAPLight.org’s conclusion that U.S House members raise 79% of their campaign funds from outside their districts!

The maps can now be found alongside the full report on MAPLight.org’s website.

We were recently pleased to learn that ESRI and TechSoup have teamed up to provide low-cost GIS software and training to non-profit organizations. Through the program, non-profits and libraries can purchase an ArcView license, an eight-module online training course, and two GIS text books for $175 (the normal price for a license of ESRI’s ArcView is $1,500).

There are very few restrictions in getting the software:

• Organizations are only allowed one license request within a fiscal year (July 1 to June 30)
• You must be a 501(c)(3) designated organization
• Libraries that are not 501(c)(3) designated must be listed in the Institute of Museum and Library Services database
• Organizations must be willing to provide information to ESRI in order to create case studies or write testimonials about the donation program and how it helped your organization

It will probably come as no surprise to you to learn that we, here at Azavea, think that GIS is a pretty powerful tool. Low cost access to GIS software offers nonprofits tremendous potential for all types of applications, ranging from mapping project locations to complex analysis for targeting new service areas. Our commitment to assisting non-profit and academic organizations has led us to work on some unbelievavbly interesting and intellectually stimulating projects. We believe that GIS can assist organizations make more informed business decisions and improve business practices, such as mapping the location of service recipients to better understand coverage areas (MANNA), promoting economic development through maps highlighting recent and planned development activity (Avenue of the Arts), creating economic potential maps showing the buying power of a target community (Social Compact), or analyzing the geographic distributions of supporters to identify potential gaps and untapped markets for future outreach efforts (Wilma Theater). The list of possibilities is endless … that’s why we’re excited to do what we do!

We see this new offering from TechSoup and ESRI as an exciting opportunity for terrific organizations to access new tools that can enhance their capacities and help them achieve their missions.

Committee of Seventy’s Election Oversight Program. This April, Pennsylvania’s unusually hotly-contested presidential primary provided a backdrop for a new and improved incident mapping project – this time moved from the desktop to the web.

With the expectation of higher-than-usual voter turnout and a large number of newly registered voters, Committee of Seventy and the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law anticipated a busy day in their hotline command center. While the desktop-created maps Azavea prepared in November were very helpful, they had limited utility on the ground, as incidents were unfolding. They hoped that a web-based mapping application would enable closer to real-time analysis and enable volunteers to access incident information from the field.

With funding from the William Penn Foundation, the Committee of Seventy and Azavea were able to design and build a proof-of-concept application to address some of the basic needs of the Election Oversight Program. Using a mix of open source software tools including Google Maps, Open Layers, GeoServer and PostGIS (read the article on PostGIS below), we built an application that enabled rapid data entry as incident information was received and easy search by incident types. Without time to build the full functionality we’d eventually like to see in this application, we continued to use the ArcView-based system to create aggregated maps showing the number of incidents in each ward, State House, and State Senate District.

April 22nd was a busy day for volunteers and Azavea staff at the command center, with well over 400 incidents reported (more than three times the calls fielded during last November’s general election). Interspersed among calls to inquire about polling place locations were numerous complaints of missing registrations and registrations mysteriously showing a new party affiliation, people unable to vote because someone else had already voted in their name, and a few voters who felt intimidated by poll workers or campaign volunteers. With the website projected on the command center wall, each new incident added a little color and another interesting bit of information illustrating Philadelphia’s primary election.

Our Phase I project proved the feasibility of building the application, and the Phase II project will refine the application and build additional functionality, including alternate workflows for different user types, developing a new user interface, expanding the alert infrastructure, and building text mining capabilities. The result will be a commercial version of the software.

Preventing crime is a more sophisticated task than simply mapping incidents or arrests and deploying resources accordingly. The ability to detect and analyze changes in the geographic patterns of crime and disorder is an innovation in policing which holds the potential to enhance the organizational capacity of police departments across the country.

HunchLab was inspired by the Crime Spike Detector that Azavea developed to help the Philadelphia Police Department identify when and where unusual increases in crime are occurring. Read our white paper for more information. The Crime Spike Detector, which has been in operation since June 2005, uses a spatial statistics algorithm developed in conjunction with Dr. Tony Smith (University of Pennsylvania) to compare current crime to historical crime across the city. Each night this ‘data mining’ service checks for spikes in different types of crime. Unusual increases result in an email being sent to the relevant district captain. The email details the severity of the spike and links to an online report with maps, charts and tables, enabling analysis of the result. .

Although HunchLab will initially be developed to assist with crime detection, tools such as the Spike Detector and HunchLab are applicable in any application where events display geographic changes in distribution, such as disease occurrence, consumer buying patterns, real estate sales, and property and mortgage fraud.

HunchLab is supported by the Small Business Innovation Research program of the National Science Foundation, Directorate for Engineering, Division of Industrial Innovations and Partnerships, Award Number (IIP-0750507).

This is the fourth time in two years that Azavea has been awarded an SBIR grant. Previous awards were SBIR Phase I awards from the National Science Foundation, the U.S Department of Education and the U.S Department of Agriculture.

On Election Day, Committee of Seventy works with the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law to coordinate the Election Oversight Program, whereby election irregularities are monitored and registered through the combined efforts of volunteers and staff at a command center in parallel with teams of lawyers and volunteers deployed throughout the city. In the command center, team leaders field calls from voters, polling officials, as well as volunteers reporting election irregularities, then immediately coordinate with their teams at these locations to respond accordingly. During Philadelphia’s 2007 general election on November 6, Committee of Seventy turned to Azavea to help geographically record, map, and geo-analyze these incidents.

Maps showing concentration of election day incidents by ward.

The primary challenge of incorporating GIS into this endeavor was to create a system that would enable both quick recording of incidents and rapid map generation throughout the day. The catch was that a variety of maps was needed, including not just point maps showing individual incidents, but also aggregations by larger political boundaries indicating both relative numbers of incidents and proportions of different types of incidents.

Using ArcView 9.2, and taking advantage of ModelBuilder technology, Azavea volunteered to create a series of models that automatically performed the aggregations, some requiring as many as 35 tasks. These models were designed to take the incident point data and create choropleth maps at the ward, council district, and division levels with each map showing the aggregated number of incidents in each area, color-coded by types of incidents.

The incident maps proved helpful in several aspects of the Election Oversight Program. Committee of Seventy was able to identify problem trends citywide, ward-wide or district-wide and quickly respond to them. The information was compiled and continously analyzed so that they could stay on top of what was going on throughout Election Day.
With few hotly contested races in this election, Committee of Seventy wasn’t expecting a large number of incidents, but despite the relatively low turnout of an off-year election, 139 incidents were reported. Incidents ranged from the expected and relatively innocuous, such as voters unsure of where their polling places were, to troubling and bizarre, such as questionable behaviors by polling officials, rumors of thugs hired to intimidate voters and, the strangest of all: a local committeeman sitting in a van passing out alcohol and suspected by some to have a gun.

Though the mere report of an incident is no guarantee that it actually happened, or that it happened in quite the way described by the caller, these reports and their accompanying maps help to paint a picture of just what occurs on Election Day, and exactly what issues and geographic locations need the most attention from voting officials.

Jonathan David, Committee of Seventy’s Election Program Coordinator, noted that the maps were particularly important to “management staff and senior-level volunteers who needed to understand problematic trends – as they developed – so teams could respond quickly.” This trial run has been a success, leading Committee of Seventy and Azavea to use this experience to plan a more automated, web-based application that they hope to deploy for the 2008 presidential primaries and elections.

To read Committee of Seventy’s post election reports (including the election incident maps Azavea created) visit http://www.seventy.org/hot-topics/-2007-election-information/november-2007-post-election-report/.

A team of researchers from the University of Pennsylvania and Johns Hopkins University set out to develop a mathematical model to assist with trauma center siting while taking these important considerations into account, and to make that model accessible through the Internet. They have developed the Trauma Resource Allocation Model for Ambulances and Hospitals (TRAMAH), a mathematical optimization model that uses population and access to existing trauma centers based on geographic relationships to ambulances and helicopters to simulate the effects of newly sited trauma centers.

Azavea partnered with the researchers and the Cartographic Modeling Lab to develop an interactive website enabling visitors to specify timeframe (access within 45 or 60 minutes) and transportation mode (ambulance, helicopter, or both), and identify the locations of current hospitals and trauma centers and their accessibility. The application provides a map and coverage information based on percentages of population and land covered by the existing system.

This website, which leverages ESRI’s ArcIMS and ArcSDE technologies, is now accessible to the public at http://tramah.cml.upenn.edu.

Many other factors may need to be taken into consideration in siting trauma centers, and the TRAMAH system will be best used alongside, rather than instead of, the specialized knowledge of trauma systems planners. It does, however, demonstrate the very real value that GIS can add when dealing with limited resources that must be allocated over extensive geographic areas.

More than 14,000 GIS enthusiasts descended on San Diego in mid-June for ESRI’s annual User Conference, and three Azavea staff members were among them. Robert, Rachel, and Megan attended the conference where they made presentations on Azavea projects, shared a booth promoting the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention’s (OJJDP) SMART application (profiled in our last edition), attended workshops and technical sessions, and met other GIS practitioners from all over the world.

During the 5-day conference (June 18th – 22nd), we had the opportunity to present six projects on behalf of our clients: PhillyHistory.org and ParcelExplorer for the Philadelphia Department of Records, ConnectServices for the Delaware Valley Association for the Education of Young Children, the Metropolitan Philadelphia Indicators Project for Temple University, TRAMAH for the University of Pennsylvania’s Cartographic Modeling Lab, and the SMART application for OJJDP. Copies of several of these presentations are available for download in the Library section of our website. We were also excited to share booth space with OJJDP and Development Services Group (DSG) to promote the SMART project, offering live demonstrations of the application and answering questions about its use and capabilities. Azavea implemented SMART using our Kaleidocade Indicators Framework.

For new attendees (as two of us were), the ESRI User Conference can be a bit overwhelming. With so many participants, workshops and presentations it was tough to choose which sessions to attend, but it was thrilling to see the range of projects being carried out using GIS technology.

Visit the application and compare the three states with Azavea offices (Pennsylvania, Vermont, and Washington.

1. In which state does the largest percentage of the population have access to trauma care by ambulance within 45 minutes?

2. Which state has the smallest percentage of land coverage within 45 minutes?

3. Explore the US map. Three states have 100% of their population with access via helicopter or ambulance within 60 minutes. Name two of them.

Be the first to send an email with all three correct answers to info@azavea.com and we will send you a $20 gift card to Barnes & Noble!

A.Which county had the higher value?
B. What was that value?

Question 2: The PhillyHistory.org website contains a link to the Historic Streets Index (under ‘Links’), which tracks street name changes over time. Visit the Historic Streets Index and type the name of the county you answered for question 1/A. The index will tell you that this street name changed into two different street names. What did it change to?

C. New Street Name #1
D. New Street Name #2

Question 3: Of the two streets identified in Question 2, only one still exists, as noted in the Historic Streets Index. Visit the Connect Services website, and search for hospitals within 1 mile of the intersection of that street + the number you found in Question 1/B.

E. How many hospitals are within 1 mile?
F. Of the hospitals located within 1 mile of that address, what is the name of the hospital located furthest to the north?

Be the first to send an email with all six correct answers to info@azavea.com and you will win a $10 gift card to Starbucks!

Chip Hitchens builds his own guitars.

Every once in a while the staff at Azavea needs to stand up, stretch the keyboard-itis out of our fingers, and run around the office. Rather than induce group mayhem we have found an organized, extra-curricular outlet for our office angst. ‘Brown Bag Lunches’ take place once a month during the lunch hour. Everyone congregates in one of our conference rooms to enjoy a collegial lunch and a presentation from one (or two) of our own. We like to consider ourselves well-rounded people to begin with, but we each have now learned a wealth of new information about topics ranging from the martial art Aikido to the ‘art and mystery’ of guitar making, and the ancient Chinese game of ‘Go.’

During a recent lunch, Robert and Rachel Cheetham donned full fencing gear and turned the center of the office into a makeshift piste (the name of the strip along which fencing bouts are held, which we learned during their presentation). A few months earlier, David Zwarg demonstrated how he uses a cell phone to blog and map his location on trips. Relaxed and fun, the Brown Bag Lunches let us share our unique talents (show off) and learn a bit more about each other in the process.

Our white paper on Gerrymandering is making its rounds in the local and internet media! Read the article The Philadelphia Inquirer published on 11/02/06 on the front page of the Local section, based on our white paper.

The winner of last edition’s contest was Emily Kahoe of The Reinvestment Fund, who correctly identified the pictured city as Philadelphia (which has two districts among the top three most gerrymandered).

In Philadelphia’s vibrant cultural landscape, theaters and other arts organizations must work hard to cultivate new audiences while delivering excellent shows and experiences for all of their patrons. The Wilma Theater recently undertook a strategic analysis of its core audiences, including a geographic study carried out by Azavea. The study used the locations of existing Wilma patrons to identify untapped markets of theater-goers. Utilizing geographic data provided by the theater and specific census variables such as per capita income, household income, number of gay/lesbian couples, percent college educated, average family size, people per square mile, median age, and average household size, Azavea determined areas of Wilma high-density neighborhoods, and used this information to describe a “typical” Wilma neighborhood. We then identified other areas in the Southeastern Pennsylvania region with similar populations and compared the two maps, highlighting the most promising areas for increased attendance of the theater.

For more information see the Spring issue of this year’s Arts and Culture Advocate, a publication of the Greater Philadelphia Cultural Alliance, in which this study was featured.

This project was performed as part of our internal research and development program. Azavea employees spend 10% of their time each month on personal research or pro bono projects, of which this analysis is just one example.

Everyone likes having trees in their neighborhood! In fact we know that the more trees in a neighborhood, the higher the quality of life and the more valuable the real estate. The above map was created based on United States Geological Survey tree canopy data — it shows tree cover in parts of Philadelphia. It’s such a good measure of neighborhood quality that Azavea’s REX application uses this metric as a decision variable to help people decide where to buy a home. You can learn more about REX at www.azavea.com/rex.

Are you interested in bringing more trees to your neighborhood? Visit http://www.treevitalize.net, a non-profit organization dedicated to increasing the number of trees planted in Southeastern Pennsylvania.