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Cicero

Cicero API: Evolving to Greet 2012 and Redistricting

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The Cicero team welcomes 2012 with a new face and a new engine.  We’ve just launched a new Cicero website (www.azavea.com/cicero).  Additionally we are in the process of developing a Cicero REST API to allow for more integration flexibility (Cicero is currently a SOAP-based API), building an online batch stamping tool, and have just released a vital and timely data set.  We’ll talk about the new API in a future newsletter, but I’ll focus on the new data set here.

Following every decennial census, each state goes through the process of redrawing their legislative district boundaries at the congressional and state levels.  As many of you know, we’ve done a significant amount of research and software development related to making the process of drawing and analyzing new legislative districts easily accessible by anyone (e.g. DistrictBuilder, Redistricting The Nation, “Redrawing the Map on Redistricting” whitepaper, etc.).

We’ve also had to consider the significant impact redistricted boundaries will have on our Cicero users.  Many organizations need to match their members or contacts to legislative districts in advance of organizing a call-to-action campaign or lobbying effort on behalf of their organization.  Many Cicero users expressed a desire to match their address databases to both the boundaries currently in place and those that will take effect in the new legislative sessions.

Because our team is continuously accessing legislative boundary and elected official data  we are  in a great position to quickly serve up this data, and are now able to support both:

  • Legislative boundaries currently in use – This includes the district boundaries released after the 2000 Census that are still in effect.  As state elections take place and inaugurations occur (Louisiana, New Jersey, Virginia elections used new boundaries in November), we will incorporate those boundaries that have gone through the final approval process by the state and will be in effect following the elections.
  • Legislative boundary plans that have been officially approved but will not take effect until the next election - This data set will not provide complete coverage of the United States until all states have completed the redistricting process.  New states will be added as we receive and process the data. 

If you have any questions about any of the Cicero team’s recent developments, please feel free to contact Project Manager, Abby Fretz at afretz@azavea.com or via phone at 215.701.7503.

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Azavea Supports Public Redistricting Competition in Philadelphia

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I’m excited to announce that this week we rolled out a new implementation of the DistrictBuilder software for our home town, Philadelphia.  The new web site, FixPhillyDistricts.com, is the result of a collaborative effort between several local organizations:  WHYY NewsWorks, the Philadelphia Daily News, Philly.com , Penn Project for Civic Engagement, and Azavea.  While the DistrictBuilder software has been used to support competitions in Virginia and Arizona, Fix Philly Districts will be the first time it’s being used for a municipal public redistricting competition.

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 (in collaboration with leading redistricting experts at the Public Mapping Project) 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

  • Wednesday, August 3, 2011 – Competition Opened
  • Thursday, August 11, 2011, 6:30pm (tonight) – DistrictBuilder Training Webinar - Register
  • Monday, August 15, 2011, 6:30pm – DistrictBuilder Training Webinar - Register
  • Sunday, 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.

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TechSoup Partnership: Free Cicero API Credits for Nonprofits

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If you work for a nonprofit and you are reading this, you will (we hope) be thrilled to learn that we have just partnered with TechSoup Global – a nonprofit organization dedicated to making technology and technology education available and affordable to other nonprofits worldwide.  We are launching a new Cicero API account offering through the TechSoup’s product donation program, which provides access to 450+ product donations to nonprofits and libraries from more than 40 donor partners, including Microsoft, Esri, Adobe, Intuit and Blackbaud.  Cicero is the first API TechSoup is making available through this program.  For more info, visit: http://azavea.com/techsoupcicero.

The new Cicero API account offering provides nonprofits with 5,000 free credits to be used for any of Cicero API’s address-based district matching or elected official data lookup web services.  Nonprofits can request a donation of Cicero a basic administrative fee of $25.  Each batch of credits is good for one year from date of purchase.  If the organization uses all 5,000 credits before they are eligible for another account through TechSoup, they can purchase additional credits directly from Azavea for the reduced nonprofit rate.

“We couldn’t be more proud to become a TechSoup Global partner, alongside Esri and other prestigious civic-minded companies.  This partnership aligns with Azavea’s mission to apply geographic data and software to promote more dynamic and sustainable communities.  Our B Corporation status is part of this commitment, and our partnership with TechSoup to provide free access to the Cicero API builds on this foundation,” says Robert Cheetham, President and CEO of Azavea.

As a reminder, the Cicero API not only provides easy access to address-based district matching but also to maps of each legislative district, contact information for local, state, and national elected officials in the United States and data for legislative officials and election events around the world.  The service includes coverage in the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland.  The Cicero team of GIS Analysts and political data researchers continue to add foreign legislatures to the data collection based on client requests.  The database also includes district matching for U.S. police districts, school districts, and watersheds.  All told, the Cicero system now holds over 10,000 legislative boundaries and information on nearly 13,000 elected officials.  The API currently provides data to public and private web applications for newspapers, election watchdog groups, philanthropic foundations, unions, arts organizations and private commercial firms.  Azavea also operates an off-line batch service for organizations that have ad hoc district-matching needs.

For more information about the Cicero API and Azavea’s other political, advocacy, redistricting or elections projects, contact Project Manager Abby Fretz at 215-701-7503 or via email at afretz@azavea.com.

And if you don’t already know what TechSoup could do for your nonprofit, check http://home.techsoup.org/ and take their Check Program Eligibility Quiz!  TechSoup provides other nonprofits and libraries with technology information and products that empower them to fulfill their missions and serve their communities.

All products are available for small administration fees to qualified organizations.  Learning resources, including articles, blogs, webinars, and forums on nonprofit-specific topics led by expert hosts are all free.

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District Builder: Open Source Web-based Redistricting Application

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As a geospatial software development company, we’ve always had an interest in the geography of politics and the role technology plays in analyzing and disseminating political data.  Over the years we have partnered on software development and spatial analysis projects with several organizations dedicated to good government and data accessibility (including Committee of Seventy, Common Cause PA, and MAPLight.org).

A district boundary editing session in District Builder

We are pleased to announce that through a partnership with Dr. Michael P. McDonald, Associate Professor at George Mason University and Director of the U.S. Elections Project, and Dr. Micah Altman, Senior Research Scientist at Harvard University Institute for Quantitative Social Science, we have just wrapped up the first round of development on the beta version of District Builder, “an open source software redistricting application designed to give the public transparent, accessible, and easy-to-use on-line mapping tools” specifically aimed at examining state-level redistricting.  Supported by funding from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to George Mason University, the Brookings Institution and the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, the software is built using several open source technologies including, django, GeoServer, Celery, jQuery, PostgreSQL, and PostGIS.

In partnership with Dr. McDonald and Dr. Altman, Azavea will continue the development of additional features and improvements to the District Builder software.  Additionally, we are building our own version of the software for use in local municipal and county-level redistricting (look for the release of our local sample in the new year).

Watch a demo of the software on Vimeo

If you’d like to read more about some of our past software development and spatial analysis projects focused on redistricting, please visit:

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Cicero’s Journey to the United Kingdom and Beyond: New Political Data and a Great Partnership

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ciceroCicero, our district matching and elected official lookup API has crossed the ocean before, with the addition of Australia and New Zealand data.  However, this week we are announcing our most recent international journey… to the United Kingdom.  Cicero users can now match any address in England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland to their corresponding legislative districts and elected officials, including:

UK_Logos

This most recent addition further sets Cicero apart from other services as the only address-based, legislative district web API that offers access to a rich collection of elected official information and legislative boundary data from around the world.

The Cicero API currently provides political data to public and private web applications for newspapers, election watchdog groups, philanthropic foundations, unions, arts organizations, and commercial firms.  Cicero provides address-based district matching, maps of each legislative district, and contact information for local, state and national elected officials in the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and now the United Kingdom.  This adds up to a total of 10,700 legislative boundaries and information on over 12,000 elected officials.

We’ve also been actively working on several other developments:

  • With the addition of Nova Scotia, Canada to Cicero, we now have full national and provincial-level coverage of Canada.
  • Through online account administration pages, our clients can now track their credit usage, activity and change their account information .
  • salsaWe are partnering with DemocracyInAction’s Salsa Labs, a web-based suite of tools for organizations, campaigns, and companies to use for online organizing, advocacy, fundraising, and communications.  Using a Cicero-enabled plugin designed specifically for the  Salsa Labs platform,  Salsa customers are now able to accurately match all their member records to the associated legislative districts at the local, state, and national levels.  The plug-in provides them with the ability to stamp each record with a geocoded point, legislative district id’s, and up-to-date elected official contact information.  With this information they are able to better analyze and direct their member database by segmenting the records using a variety of district types, and conduct ‘Call to Action’ email and SMS text campaigns.
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‘Cicero Free’ Account: Match Constituents to Elected Officials. For Free!

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cicero_smCicero, our legislative district matching and elected official lookup web service API now provides a truly valuable offer, especially for clients on a budget: a FREE subscription plan.  The Cicero Free account offers users up to 1,000 credits each month which can be used toward any coordinate-based legislative district matching, elected official data lookups and/or map web service requests.  Why use the Cicero Free account?  For instance, your organization might need to feed your website or online application with legislative data or match an online database of member addresses to their elected officials.  Now you can do it through the Cicero API free of charge, and carry out your political advocacy work stress-free.

The Cicero API currently provides legislative district matching and elected official data to public and private web applications for newspapers, election watchdog groups, philanthropic foundations, unions, arts organizations and commercial firms.  An example of an application powered by a Cicero Free account is ‘Our Philadelphia’, a new website built by Common Cause Pennsylvania. The site tracks campaigns contributions in Pennsylvania and will also soon focus on redistricting reform for Philadelphia and the state, tracking the influence of lobbyists, and promoting higher ethical standards for public officials.

Powered by CiceroSubscribers to the Cicero Free account are only required to post a ‘powered by Cicero’ logo on their public-facing website, and be able to make legislative district matching requests to the Cicero API by passing already geocoded address coordinate (latitude/longitude) points to the Cicero API.  Details about the Cicero Free plan are available here.

Stay tuned for more exciting Cicero developments….

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Cicero: New, Lower Price and a Batch District Matching for Quick Turnaround Advocacy Activities

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cicero_200wFor all our readers out there who love our district matching and legislator web API, Cicero, we have two pieces of good news.  First, our move to the ArcGIS Online premium geocoding service earlier this year has enabled us to lower the price of Cicero.  We have also changed our pricing from a subscription model based on the number of hits per month to one based on annual blocks of credits.   Second, we are launching a new Batch Geocoding and District Matching service.

Our new Batch Geocoding and District Matching service uses the same Cicero API we provide for developers, but it enables you to send us a database of addresses (as an Excel spreadsheet for instance), and we’ll return your addresses to you stamped with all of the districts you request as well as any legislator contact information.  And this is all at an affordable price.  The data returned with your addresses can include:

  • Geocoded coordinates for each address
  • Local, State and Federal legislative district id’s for the U.S., Canada, Australia and New Zealand
  • Elected official name, contact information, etc.
  • Non-legislative district id’s such as counties, school districts, watersheds, police districts, etc.

This is just the first step. We are working on more ways to use Cicero including integration with Salesforce.com and an online batch district matching service, so stay tuned for more developments.

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New CiceroLive: Faster Map Generation, New Legislative Data and Redistricting Galore

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"We've been working hard to make [Cicero] better and faster and bigger -- a super-sized government data tool, if you will."
Example of Cicero API generated district map display

All across the blogosphere and tweetscape, people have been crying out for transparency, open government, and easy access to legislative data. The Obama Administration has pledged to create a more transparent and connected democracy. A major part of this initiative involves making government data and research available on the soon-to-be-launched website Data.gov. Legislators and government officials have been preparing for this change by soliciting advice from the tech citizenry on the best (and coolest) ways to distribute bulk data to the public.

Azavea is listening.

And tweeting … and blogging. We’re committed to participating in conversations about open government, and we think we can play a role in helping people make sense of millions of records of government data about to inundate them.

Cicero is our district matching and elected official lookup web API. We’ve been working hard to make it better and faster, and bigger — a supersized government data tool, if you will. Our most recent upgrades to the web service and database include faster map generation (as demonstrated in our newly released, free CiceroLive site), newly redistricted legislative boundaries, the addition of new local city council assemblies (Orlando, Atlantic City, Tulsa, and Berkeley to name just a few), all US governors, as well as national watershed boundaries at the HUC10 and HUC12 levels. We’re also keeping track of the plans local and state governments are making to tweak legislative boundaries after the 2010 Census. Redistricting will be a huge issue in the open government world over the next few years, and we’re ready for the flood of maps and data that will need to be generated.

New release of CiceroLive, loaded with tons of new legislative data

Cicero is part of an exciting new trend in public engagement by online media outlets. As news organizations struggle to survive in a tough economy and compete for dwindling readership, they are finding a wide variety of innovative ways to pull traffic to their online news sites. Political data tools are a big draw.

For example, The New York Times recently released ‘Represent‘, a district and news lookup tool for the five New York boroughs. ‘Represent’ enables New Yorkers to type in their address and receive a list of their elected officials (down to the neighborhood association level) and maps of New York political districts. Users can click on the name of an elected official and read all the Times articles that include a mention of that official.

The Oregonian, a newspaper serving Portland and its suburbs, has also been offering their online readers more innovative ways to follow politics. On November 4, 2008, the day of the national elections, Their Oregon Legislature page used the Cicero API to make election results more local, relevant, and exciting. Readers could enter their address into The Oregonian’s Cicero-driven political web tool and then watch live tallies of votes for key political races in their legislative districts.

What’s next? Want to participate in the conversation?
http://twitter.com/CiceroAPI

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Research: The Amazon Elastic Cloud

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"I am exploring the use of The Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) as a resource for some of Azavea projects already in use. DecisionTree, our geographic prioritization system, was an ideal first candidate..."

I am very excited about my Azavea research project on the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), a technology from Amazon Inc. that is shifting a lot of people’s ideas about what computing is and can do. Amazon EC2 has arisen through the confluence of technological innovations of the past few years.

First some background. One of the most basic pieces of infrastructure in the World Wide Web today is the ubiquitous entity known as “The Server”. This term is used for a computer which performs some task or tasks on behalf of other computers. For example, web pages come from a web “server”, which sends web pages to your computer for you to see. Moreover this web server may in turn query other servers to complete this request — contact a database server to get data or geospatial server to produce a map image for example.

The idea behind a computing “cloud” (and there are others — as referenced in Robert’s ‘What the Heck is…” article above) is a bunch of computers accessible from the internet which “instantiate” whole virtual computers — with all their associated operating systems, software, data, etc. — that can be accessed on demand. One can instantiate one of these machines, connect to it via the internet through standard remote connection protocols, and voila! your screen shows the desktop for this “computer” that behaves exactly as if it were sitting under your desk.

While for desktops, this approach is odd, for servers there can be many benefits. With a few clicks of a mouse, multiple copies of the same server can be up and running at the same time to handle increases in demand. They can be shut down again when not needed. The details and headaches of actually running and owning physical machinery are offloaded to the cloud provider. The cloud provider also provides bandwidth. Once you have a working version of a website, database, or geospatial server, it can be copied and reused — no need to start from scratch with configuration.

For my research project, I am exploring the use of The Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) as a resource for some of Azavea projects already in use. DecisionTree, our geographic prioritization web system, was an ideal first candidate. This product requires strong computing resources and was designed from the ground up to be able to run on multiple computers. With EC2 we were able to run DecisionTree on 10 instances at once, dramatically speeding up its operations and providing a mechanism for running DecisionTree for customers who do not want to maintain their own server infrastructure.

In addition to DecisionTree, we are also experimenting with running our Cicero legislative and election data service on EC2 as well as other ways to leverage the Amazon Web Services. For example, last spring, we tested a map image ’tile cache’ service that will generate and store a set of map tiles, enabling an organization to reduce bandwidth usage and improve responsiveness of a high traffic web mapping application. While EC2 was originally limited to Linux-based software, the recent addition of Windows Server as a target platform has provided much more flexibility. Do you have ideas for how you could use Amazon Web Services for your GIS project? Let us know.

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The Geography of Democracy: Azavea Brings the Power of GIS to the Elections Arena

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"Our mission is grand: Put the power of GIS and mapping into the hands of voters, grassroots campaign workers, and watchdog organizations. "

Map displaying ‘likely’ and ‘super’ voters by division.

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.

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Cicero Gets a Makeover: New Website, New Data and New Clients

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"Information is the currency of democracy." -- Thomas Jefferson

Try CiceroTM for free. Sign up for a 30-day free trial account with access to the API and 250 credits.

After reading about Azavea’s involvement in the realm of elections, you won’t be surprised to hear that over the past several months we’ve been paying a lot of attention to Cicero, our elected official and legislative district boundary web API. The most obvious, major change to Cicero is the new website which has received a recent makeover! Visitors to the site can now get a thorough taste of Cicero’s offerings, including our live feed of the latest elections events from around the world, the opportunity to try the ‘Cicero Live’ web site, and – should you be a programmer – the option to sign up for a 30-day free trial of the Cicero API. For the Cicero die-hards out there, check out our Cicero News page.

The changes to Cicero go beyond appearances! Our Cicero data research team has hunkered down and have been researching and preparing several new sets of data.

With over 11,250 elected officials and 9,000 elected districts, we’ve recently been focusing on adding new legislative assemblies from across the world to our data offerings. In fact, we just announced the release of state and national legislative district and elected official lookups for Australia and New Zealand.

We also turned our attention to non-legislative district data. Via the Cicero API, our clients can now conduct address-based lookups for a wide variety of non-legislative data. In addition to school district data for the entire United States (which we’ve been offering for the past year), we have added police district boundaries for 25 of the most populated cities in the United States, county boundaries for the entire country, and watershed boundary data at the HUC 2 through HUC 8 levels.

Why are we adding entirely new types of boundary datasets? Our clients use legislative district boundaries and the associated elected official data to populate constituent databases with district ID’s for use in mailings, to perform constituent analysis, to drive e-mail campaigns and to provide their constituents with a tool to contact their elected officials. But our clients serve a wide variety of causes and populations. Some might be conducting environmental advocacy or analysis projects, others may be interested in understanding voter patterns in relation to other non-legislative districts while others may want to be able to identify in which police precincts their constituents live or work. No matter what causes or activities they pursue, our client’s know they can depend on Cicero’s ever expanding and up-to-date datasets!

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Azavea Newsletter Puzzle: Elections, Schmelections – Let’s Play a Game!

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You may have noticed that there happens to be an election going on. Here at Azavea we’re always paying attention to elections across the country and around the world to keep our Cicero Elected Official Lookup as up to date as possible. In honor of the upcoming presidential election and our new election data available on Cicero, this month’s puzzle gets a little political.

1. The second debate between the Republican and Democratic presidential candidates was held on October 7, 2008 at Belmont University in Nashville, Tennessee. Using the Cicero Live Demo and the address for Belmont University (1900 Belmont Blvd Nashville, Tennessee), find the name of the Congressman who represents the Nashville area in the U.S. House of Representatives. Hint: He is a Democrat and represents District 5.

2. The President of the United States resides in the White House at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington DC. The District of Columbia has one (non-voting) representative who sits in the US House of Representatives. Using Cicero Live and the address for the White House (1600 Pennsylvania Avenue Washington DC), find the name of that Congresswoman. Hint: She is a Republican whose district type is ‘National Lower’.

3. US Presidents often meet with foreign leaders at home and abroad. In May 2008, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd of Australia visited the United States. If the new US President wanted to reciprocate with a similar gesture, he would probably travel to the Parliament House in Australia to meet with the Prime Minister. Using Cicero Live and the address of the Parliament House (Parliament Drive in the city of Canberra in the province of Australian Capital Territory in the country of Australia (AS)), find the name of the Member of Parliament who represents Canberra. Hint: She is a member of the Australian Labor Party.

Send your answers to info@azavea.com. Be the first to send in all three correct answers and receive a $25 gift card to Barnes & Noble! The winner will be announced in our next newsletter.

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Cicero: Release of 30-day Free Trial and Canada Legislative Data

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"If you're not convinced... [try] a Cicero API 30-day free trial..."

Quick show of hands: how many of you know for certain which state senate district you live in? The identity of your state representative? The geographic boundaries of your elected officials’ districts or the last time they were redrawn?

For many organizations, this type of information is both invaluable and difficult to get with any degree of reliability. Knowing the geographic boundaries of the districts in which their members live can help to encourage them to express their opinions to the elected officials who represent them. Further, knowing the exact geographic boundaries of their members’ districts can help organizations more directly in their own advocacy roles. Imagine you work for a local non-profit and are scheduled to meet with a group of state representatives from your area. How would you like to be able to tell each of them just how many of the citizens they represent are supporters of your organization? How would you like to be able to tell those members that you spoke directly with their representative?

Cicero is designed to help. It is a web API (Application Programming Interface) that enables users to add legislator and legislative geography lookup capabilities -matching any address with their designated legislative districts and elected officials, including their geographic boundaries- to any website or software application. It is a cost-effective and precise way for organizations to receive legislative information, including contact information for their local (check our list of available local cities), state and federal level representatives, district maps, and school district identification.

If you’re not convinced … We just released a Cicero API 30-day free trial, now giving developers the opportunity to ‘test drive’ the API with their company or organization’s website or software – for free! Each 30-day free trial includes access to one region of your choice and up to 250 web service hits. Visitors to the Cicero site can also experience Cicero first-hand by visiting ‘Cicero Live‘ to get the information about elected officials who represent any address in the U.S.

In October we announced the release of several new, comprehensive sets of data including city council districts for more than 60 cities, and district lookup and legislator contact data for all U.S. state and federal legislative districts. We are thrilled to announce the addition of legislative and legislative geographic boundaries lookups for local, provincial and federal level data for the majority of the lower provinces in Canada (available soon on Cicero Live) – go Canucks!

Coming soon: Australia, New Zealand and France. Visit the Cicero website for more information, as well as an updated list of available data.

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Puzzle: Cicero Live

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It’s a clue! Cicero maps of our representative voting districts.

Try Cicero Live!

1. Azavea is located at 340 N. 12th Street in Philadelphia, PA. Using Cicero, find the United States Democratic Senator who represents the area where Azavea is located. What is the name of that Senator?

2. Using the link included on the same Cicero results page, go to the website for the Senator from Question 1. On the frontpage of that website, find the address for the Senator’s office in Pittsburgh. What is that address?

3.Using the address from Question 2, go to Cicero and find the name of the Congressman representing District 14. What is the Congressman’s telephone number?

Extra Credit: Dave, the lead software developer for Cicero, works at Azavea’s office in Burlington, Vermont. Test your research skills and find an address located in Burlington. Plug that number into Cicero and find the name of any elected official who represents the City of Burlington. What is the name of that elected official?

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!

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Cicero: Tons of New Data Available

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"Information is the currency of democracy." - Thomas Jefferson

“Information is the currency of democracy. –Thomas Jefferson

Our democratic institutions rely on citizens, businesses, and other organizations that are willing to communicate needs and opinions to their elected officials. But do you know who all of your legislators are or how to reach them? I don’t either. Cicero is designed to help. It is a Web API (application programming interface) that enables you to add legislator lookup capabilities to any web site or software application. It is a cost-effective and precise way to deliver this information, including maps showing the district boundaries. In a nutshell, it is a web-based, easily integratable elected official lookup for local, state, and national information. It simply matches addresses with the elected officials who represent these addresses.

We built Cicero in early 2006 to support local arts advocacy in Pennsylvania. By fall of that year, we offered a national service covering 40 cities. We are thrilled to announce the recent release of several new, comprehensive sets of data: In addition to city council districts for more than 60 cities we now offer district lookup and legislator contact data (district number, address(es), phone number(s), email, party, etc.) for all U.S. state and federal legislative districts. We continue to update Cicero as elections take place, legislators are replaced and regions go through the process of redistricting. You can try Cicero here.

We created Cicero with the intention of giving advocacy groups, non-profits, foundations and politically active individuals access to accurate local, state, and national elected official contact information, quickly and all in one central location vs. through multiple online resources. Organizations can subscribe to a web-service API that seamlessly interfaces with their constituents’ databases for them to provide their own stakeholders with a customizable array of contact information for key political decision-makers across the United States. This information is used to empower citizens to engage with their elected officials and thereby influence the outcome of decisions. Cicero can provide you with the local legislator data that you need to affect policy. And it now has state, national, and school districts information on top of that!

Visit the Cicero website for more information, as well as updated lists of available data.

U.S. school district lookup as well as Canada and Australia legislative districts, coming soon!

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What the Heck is a Web Service?

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In addition to development of custom GIS web applications, Azavea has been developing web services for the past few years. What exactly are web services? They are a standards-based way to provide software building blocks over a network. They are not complete web applications on their own. Rather, they are small pieces of capability that can be combined to build new applications. A web service is also sometimes called a Web API (Application Programming Interface).

One web service that Azavea developed and hosts is Cicero. Cicero is a legislative district locator, elected official database, and legislative mapping service that provides data on local, state, and national legislatures. It is being used to support political advocacy campaigns and data integration.

ESRI also offers a suite of web services known as ArcWeb Services that provides geocoding, spatial query, and map generation capabilities that can be integrated into any application with access to the web. Several of Azavea’s web applications use ArcWeb Services, including Delaware Valley Association for the Education of Young Children’s (DVAEYC) CONNECT Services. This application uses ArcWeb for routing and geocoding. The key advantage is that the service provider (ESRI) takes responsibility for providing up-to-date street data, and we can focus on how we want the application to use the data instead of managing it ourselves.

Web services can also be chained together so that one building block is used by another to provide a new capability. For example, in Cicero, we use ArcWeb Services for locating addresses, but then we use the Cicero data for looking up the legislative districts, creating maps or finding data about legislators for the location. When web services are linked together like this into a more complex system, it is sometimes known as a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA).

Web services are a fundamental part of the Web 2.0 revolution that focuses on making data open and easily sharable. There are several web sites that facilitate working with web services. Programmable Web is sort of like a phone book for public web API’s. OpenKapow enables users to develop their own web services that consist of sequences of actions one would take on a web site to view data or perform an activity. And Yahoo! Pipes enables users to combine sequences of RSS feeds into customized data streams.

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The Gerrymandering Index

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The shapes in the image above are real legislative district boundaries. Gerrymandering, as described in the last edition of the Azavea Journal, is all about drawing electoral districts for political gain. Gerrymandering has largely gone without any official definition or measurement, more closely following the principle of “I know it when I see it.”  While no standards work without exception, Azavea has used the geography of the legislative districts to calculate the level of gerrymandering across the US. Based on the local and federal districts stored in our Cicero Elected Official Lookup Service, we have created a list of the most gerrymandered districts in the US. To learn more about gerrymandering and to see the list, read our new Gerrymandering white paper.

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).

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Cicero

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The past ten years have seen an unprecedented increase in the number of non-governmental organizations that specialize in providing communities with a voice in local politics. Non-profits embark on a variety of campaigns that seek to give their members and the public information about local elected officials and a way to voice their opinions. Several of these organizations have realized that their correspondence campaigns lack effectiveness because the recipients do not know exactly which local elected official they should be contacting.

Upon the realization that the core concerns of these issues lie in geography, several non-profits turned to Azavea in search of a solution. In response, we are proud to present a new web service aimed at bridging the gap between political advocacy and local government. We call it Cicero, in honor of the legendary Roman orator of the 1st century BC. Cicero uses a “geocoding” service to reference an address in more than 30 cities nationwide, providing the inquiring user with pertinent information on who their local elected official is and how they might be in contact with him or her. We continue to add new cities every week. We invite you to check out Cicero for yourself at http://www.azavea.com/cicero.

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