“Democracy is the worst form of government except for all those others that have been tried.” —Winston Churchill
The Citizen’s Compact with City Hall (http://www.reformballot.org/) is a grassroots democracy action born out of the Reformer’s Roundtable, an organization convened by Philadelphia Forward (http://www.philadelphiaforward.org/). We like what these people are trying to do to improve city government in Philadelphia, so we’re lending a hand.
The idea was to get a quick and intuitive representation for the geographic distribution of individuals who sign the Citizen’s Compact with City Hall. When a visitor signs the compact, their contact information and address are saved. The Reformer’s Roundtable wanted to show a map that changed as more and more citizens volunteered to become involved. Not only that, we wanted to protect each individual’s address using some geographic aggregation. Turn it around in a little over a week? That was where the fun began.
Azavea turned to ESRI’s ArcWeb Services, GoogleMaps and Open Source software to achieve this dynamic, interactive map. The addresses are geocoded with ESRI’s ArcWeb Services (http://www.arcwebservices.com/), processed and stored in a PostGIS database, and rendered in OpenLayers via MapServer using the GoogleMaps basemap. All in all, a tidy package that processes visitor information and dynamically generates a map of aggregated citizen distribution.
This is an exciting project for us – it is a good cause and it involves an intriguing constellation of geographic information technologies. As part of our staff’s research, we have developed a bit of expertise in each of these realms, but hadn’t had the opportunity to bring them all together in one project. We are excited to see it in action, and we hope you take a moment to check it out.
And if you live in Philadelphia, please consider signing the Citizen’s Compact. When you sign the compact, you’ll get access to a wiki where you can contribute your own ideas for political reform in the City. In a couple of weeks, you’ll have a chance to rate those ideas. Then, the top-rated ideas will be sent to each of the candidates for City Council and Mayor to see what they are willing to support. The results will all be posted online.
