Re: Introductions

I'm Phil Ashlock and I've been involved with two projects that relate to
the work here: DemocracyMap and Open311.

DemocracyMap is an effort to provide a standardized geospatial lookup for
all the political geographies and elected officials that represent a
particular location. So far the work has been focused on the United States,
but it's similar to OpenNorth Represent in Canada and MapIt in the UK. In
the US it builds off of datasets managed at the state and national level
like the OpenStates project and the Sunlight Congress API, but goes further
to fill in gaps, particularly at the local level. Currently, DemocracyMap
provides primary contact information for essentially every city, county,
and state in the United States as well as contact information for all state
and national legislators, all governors, all county officials, and over
100,000 municipal officials. This is all still very much a work in
progress, but a basic demo can be seen at api.democracymap.org/demo

Open311 is a set of API standards for citizen-to-government interactions,
primarily to report problems to a city government like a pothole or
graffiti. You might be familiar with this model in tools like FixMyStreet
or SeeClickFix, but similar interactions are facilitated by many other
tools including those for crisis response like Ushahidi. The current
Open311 GeoReport v2 standard (http://wiki.open311.org/GeoReport_v2) was
finalized in 2011 and is now implemented by dozens of major cities,
products, and open source projects around the world. Yet since Open311 APIs
are a distributed standard where each API endpoint is meant to serve a
defined jurisdiction, the work that relates to this discussion in the
infrastructure needed to automatically discover the appropriate API
endpoint for a particular location. If I'm using an Open311 app in Chicago
it needs to be able to find the API endpoint for Chicago rather than the
one for Boston. Obviously this model doesn't just apply to 311 services and
some work has already begun to define a service discovery mechanism
associated with political geographies. See
http://wiki.open311.org/Service_Discovery and
http://wiki.open311.org/GeoWeb_DNS. The state of Massachusetts is in the
process of prototyping this kind of routing and discovery mechanism. Some
similar work has also been occurring around defining government data
catalogs (like DCAT) and I can imagine those also being a part of this sort
of geospatial service discovery approach.

Both of these projects began while I was working at OpenPlans, but
DemocracyMap received a lot more attention during a recent 6 month stint as
a Presidential Innovation Fellow working on Project MyUSA (http://my.usa.gov).
DemocracyMap was developed as an API to start to connect similar kinds of
information and resources across all levels of government. Currently I'm
working independently under the name CivicAgency.org and seeking funding
(like the News Challenge<https://www.newschallenge.org/profiles/philipashlock/>)
and other opportunities to continue working on these projects.

On Wed, Mar 20, 2013 at 12:39 PM, Dan Melton <DanM@granicus.com> wrote:

> Hi Everyone,
>
> I'm Dan Melton, deputy CTO at Granicus. Previously, I worked as the CTO
> for Code for America. At Granicus, we're publishing data for about 1000
> govt's across north america for public meetings. We plan to extend that in
> the next few months, and I am very interested in mapping to this standard
> for interoperable data.
>
> At the moment, I'm focused on the process of creating unique ids for
> jurisdictions/organizations and would love thoughts on the topic, or
> pointers to resources.
>
> We have a particular challenge in our data, in that, we maintain data on
> all levels of government, including special districts, school districts
> etc.  Rather than assigning an internal granicus id to special district X,
> I'm curious if anyone has ideas around a country-subregional-id-model or
> some other paradigm to approach the problem?  I've been using the fips info
> for the US and am tackling Canada shortly…so plan to use the official
> designation id from CA gov.
>
> I see the standard has several types of identifiers (DUNS, TIN) in the
> proposed spec, which could work, but as a data provider, maintaining a
> multi-national set of unique identifiers gets a little more difficult
> (nonuniques ids across different types of sources)..totally doable though,
> but is there a country or other such code we might append/prepend to the
> identifier (USA-FIPS-45678, or USA-DUNS-34456-3211)?
>
> Also, should we be using a private corporation's record identifier (DUNS)
> or the federal government designation of the country? I.e. IRS or FIPS for
> the US?
>
> The main question is, should we provide guidance on the main id to
> encourage cross compatible look ups? Or just rely on identifier block
> matching?
>
> Thoughts?
>
> Thanks
> Dan
>
>