How specific do you get with Voter precincts/districts? The census site has voter districts from 2000 and 2010, but some of those are changed every year.
Any applications built to analyze elections data with map overlays require this data, and it's really hard to come up with some 250k voter districts from disparate sources.
And yeah, you're on point about redistricting being a complete f'ing headache. Do you know if there's any centralized government source for maps of redistricted precincts?
Secretaries of State seems to keep shapefiles of their districts, but its never all of them. Check those websites first.
Local boards of elections are required to keep some record of the precinct maps on hand, but in many places aren't required to keep past ones - so it is in fact impossible to keep historical GIS data for some counties. There's also a lot of cases where records are simply kept as pencil or pen sketches, and no shapefiles exist.
You want to build a majorly disruptive business? Provide brain-dead-simple GIS tools to boards of elections so they can re-draw their own district maps every year. Offer them to software for free, and then resell the data they create to people building campaign tools - or build your own campaign tools and sell those.
My existing workflow for this kind of thing (but not down to city level) has been to start with Wikimedia Commons's SVG-ification of the county/state borders (http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:USA_Counties_with_FIP...), and then apply appropriate transformations to the SVG file, like shading the counties (tutorial on that at http://flowingdata.com/2009/11/12/how-to-make-a-us-county-th...). I might continue to use that for quick-and-dirty uses, but proper shapefile data is more flexible, and the city outlines are a very nice addition.
Hey, thanks for checking it out! And thanks for the Wikimedia link, I had no idea that existed.
One of the cool things about this script is that it can be extended to grab any of the data from the Census -- for example, I'm using a less-polished version to grab state legislative districts (both lower and upper houses).
This is why we need to continue to advocate for open government and open access to data.
Weather companies like Accuweather were annoyed by the National Weather Service releasing weather data in KML form -- they saw it as a threat to their lucrative business of selling public domain weather data. Sen. Rick Sanatorum tried to come to the rescue with a bill that would limit their ability to release that data.
This is disingenuous, Accuweather is headquartered in College Station, PA... The state that Santorum represented as senator. The owners, employees at Accuweather are his constituents.
The insinuation that as a Senator, your priority should be supporting open data standards vs representing the constituents you're elected to represent.
12,000,000 people who are building competitor weather services using public domain data? Less than 1% of the populace there probably knows they can get public domain data, let alone build a weather competitor business... which is really what the OP was complaining about.
No, 120,000,000 people who might benefit from apps built by others on the open data.
It is good IMO for a rep to fight for legislation that helps local businesses when that action serves his constituents as a group over the long term.
That's not the case here because what Santorum did is attempt to artificially block competition in a space where competition is likely to benefit all of his constituents in the long term. It's selling out the majority for the sake of one small business and creating a wasteful bit of government that small gov types like Santorum ought to be fighting against. It's creating a barrier to free market completion for the sake of a small win for one small company.
One could argue that a taxpayer subsidized weather service kills private competition. How do you compete with free?
Of course, all those arguments miss the point. The weather service is an important function of the government, we shouldn't have to pay for weather. It's a matter of public safety and information, the property of the commons, not some commodity. Protecting that is the reason we have a government, not to artificially support a Senator's local business.
I completely agree with your reasoning on why weather data is public data. Its actually not an argument about business at all but one of the public interest.
To expand on you reasoning a bit I think there is a general test we can apply to all government data collection and publishing practices. If the data is being collected then its been determined to be in the public's interest to do so and therefore it's also in the public interest to release it freely in a reasonably accessible format. If the set is not useful then releasing it serves to at least inform citizens that we're wasting money so we can exert pressure to stop collecting the useless set.
The exception of course is gov data that may have privacy or security implications but nevertheless eventually it should be released when those concerns are no longer valid.
Yes, you should be doing that. House members can run on bringing home the bacon - though not at the expense of monopolistic policies, in my view. Senate members are supposed to be above such things, in theory, an represent the national interest rather than the provincial one.
They were appointed once, yes. Purpose is in the eye of the beholder to a large extent; it seems to me that the Constitution's authors saw the purpose of the upper chamber primarily as a check on the populist passions of the lower one, and specified the appointment of senators precisely to avoid them being beholden to public opinion in the their state of origin. Then again, the same people preferred the idea of Senator being a lifetime appointment, somewhat like the House of Lords in Britain...
You've managed to cover so much that is wrong with our current political system in so few words that I can't even down vote you, It's simply impressive.
The job of the government, and in this case, the senate, is to represent the populous, in this case the state, not play special party to any particular organization.
Accuweather has fewer than 500 employees many of whom are not even in Pennsylvania, meanwhile Pennsylvania has a population of almost 13 million.
So why exactly is it that you think it is 'just', 'correct' or any other possible form of 'right' for this senator to support this company for any other reason than it being in the best interests of his _true_ constituents? That is, the people he represents that are not in the, at most, ~.0035% of his states population that work at accuweather?
We're using this for our site, http://www.mygovhub.org, which grabs down to the county & local level. (Although we don't have districts at that level, as they'll have to be inputted manually...)
It's worth noting that these are approximations of zip code areas, rather than exact zip codes. http://www.census.gov/geo/ZCTA/zcta.html - for most reasons, it'll be good enough, though.
I don't think d3 or protovis explicitly pack any actual map data as part of the framework, no. But you could certainly make use of the kml with d3 to produce maps.
34 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 81.8 ms ] threadhttp://market.weogeo.com/?query=census&lat=37.20852&...
It is always good though to see governments try and make using their data easier. Quite a shift...
Not sure if I'm misunderstanding you, but I should make it clear that we're not a government-affiliated entity.
Any applications built to analyze elections data with map overlays require this data, and it's really hard to come up with some 250k voter districts from disparate sources.
And yeah, you're on point about redistricting being a complete f'ing headache. Do you know if there's any centralized government source for maps of redistricted precincts?
Secretaries of State seems to keep shapefiles of their districts, but its never all of them. Check those websites first.
Local boards of elections are required to keep some record of the precinct maps on hand, but in many places aren't required to keep past ones - so it is in fact impossible to keep historical GIS data for some counties. There's also a lot of cases where records are simply kept as pencil or pen sketches, and no shapefiles exist.
You want to build a majorly disruptive business? Provide brain-dead-simple GIS tools to boards of elections so they can re-draw their own district maps every year. Offer them to software for free, and then resell the data they create to people building campaign tools - or build your own campaign tools and sell those.
My existing workflow for this kind of thing (but not down to city level) has been to start with Wikimedia Commons's SVG-ification of the county/state borders (http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:USA_Counties_with_FIP...), and then apply appropriate transformations to the SVG file, like shading the counties (tutorial on that at http://flowingdata.com/2009/11/12/how-to-make-a-us-county-th...). I might continue to use that for quick-and-dirty uses, but proper shapefile data is more flexible, and the city outlines are a very nice addition.
One of the cool things about this script is that it can be extended to grab any of the data from the Census -- for example, I'm using a less-polished version to grab state legislative districts (both lower and upper houses).
Weather companies like Accuweather were annoyed by the National Weather Service releasing weather data in KML form -- they saw it as a threat to their lucrative business of selling public domain weather data. Sen. Rick Sanatorum tried to come to the rescue with a bill that would limit their ability to release that data.
It is good IMO for a rep to fight for legislation that helps local businesses when that action serves his constituents as a group over the long term.
That's not the case here because what Santorum did is attempt to artificially block competition in a space where competition is likely to benefit all of his constituents in the long term. It's selling out the majority for the sake of one small business and creating a wasteful bit of government that small gov types like Santorum ought to be fighting against. It's creating a barrier to free market completion for the sake of a small win for one small company.
Of course, all those arguments miss the point. The weather service is an important function of the government, we shouldn't have to pay for weather. It's a matter of public safety and information, the property of the commons, not some commodity. Protecting that is the reason we have a government, not to artificially support a Senator's local business.
To expand on you reasoning a bit I think there is a general test we can apply to all government data collection and publishing practices. If the data is being collected then its been determined to be in the public's interest to do so and therefore it's also in the public interest to release it freely in a reasonably accessible format. If the set is not useful then releasing it serves to at least inform citizens that we're wasting money so we can exert pressure to stop collecting the useless set.
The exception of course is gov data that may have privacy or security implications but nevertheless eventually it should be released when those concerns are no longer valid.
The job of the government, and in this case, the senate, is to represent the populous, in this case the state, not play special party to any particular organization.
Accuweather has fewer than 500 employees many of whom are not even in Pennsylvania, meanwhile Pennsylvania has a population of almost 13 million.
So why exactly is it that you think it is 'just', 'correct' or any other possible form of 'right' for this senator to support this company for any other reason than it being in the best interests of his _true_ constituents? That is, the people he represents that are not in the, at most, ~.0035% of his states population that work at accuweather?
We're using this for our site, http://www.mygovhub.org, which grabs down to the county & local level. (Although we don't have districts at that level, as they'll have to be inputted manually...)
(I noticed google maps now knows zip code shapes)