Re: Introductions

I'm Mike Shultz, a Web developer at Project Vote Smart.  We collect and
distribute bios, interest group ratings, public statements, Key Votes, and
issue positions on candidates and officials from the president down to city
council(though limited at the local level).  Our primary products are our
Web site(http://votesmart.org), API(http://votesmart.org/share/api), and
our interactive flash app, VoteEasy(http://voteeasy.org).

We would like to participate to share any experience we have in organizing
this data, as well as to hopefully get our systems to be interoperable with
others in the field.


On Sun, Apr 14, 2013 at 3:34 PM, Robert Cheetham <cheetham@azavea.com>wrote:

> I'm Robert Cheetham, and I'm the founder of Azavea, a software development
> firm (and a B Corp <http://www.bcorporation.net/what-are-b-corps>) based
> in Philadelphia and Boston that was founded to create civic software for
> the web.
>
> Azavea works in a number of different areas related to geospatial data
> visualization and analysis including: elections/politics,
> libraries/archives/museums, urban forestry, water infrastructure, and land
> conservation.
>
> Of relevance to this list is our open source redistricting software,
> DistrictBuilder <http://www.azavea.com/districtbuilder/>, and our Cicero
> API <http://www.azavea.com/cicero/>, which provides endpoints for
> legislative district identification, contact information for elected
> officials, and district maps.  Cicero covers national, state and local
> cities (about 100 cities) in the U.S., Canada, Australia, UK, New Zealand
> and Mexico.  Cicero also provides an end point for querying election events
> globally.  Cicero has been around long enough that we have now gone through
> redistricting processes in most of the countries we cover and have recently
> re-organized the API to support both historic queries and new redistricting
> plans that will go into effect in the future.
>
> I have taken a look at the Popolo draft and have several comments but will
> write those up on separate threads.
>
> Robert
>
> ------------------
> Robert Cheetham
>
> Azavea  |  340 N 12th St, Ste 402, Philadelphia, PA
> cheetham@azavea.com  | T 215.701.7713  | F 215.925.2663
> Web azavea.com <http://www.azavea.com/>  |  Blog azavea.com/blogs  |
> Twitter @ <http://goog_858212415>rcheetham <http://twitter.com/rcheetham> and
> @azavea <http://twitter.com/azavea>
>
> Hey, I'm Stephane Guidoin, working at Open North like James McKinney who
> initiated this group.
>
> Like many others here, I am deeply involved in open data and would like to
> participate to the development of open data standards.
>
> My main focus currently is a project named open511, largely inspired by
> Open311 but for traffic data (More information here :http://opennorth.github.com/Open511API/). Given Open North approach and
> requests from government interested in Open511, we want to bring Open511 to
> the state of "standard" (e.g recognized by a standardization body). While
> some stakeholders of the project are pushing toward transportation oriented
> standardization bodies (like ITE), we are more leaning toward bodies that
> have a good history of open standard and which could link open data
> standards together.
>
> So, on top of preparing specifications, it would also be interested to see
> some discussion about governance.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Stéphane
>
> On Fri, Mar 22, 2013 at 7:41 PM, Philip Ashlock <phil@civicagency.org <phil@civicagency.org?Subject=Re%3A%20Introductions&In-Reply-To=%253CCALoW1wDMV_BP%2Bb0U-W5Pp21cO1Rs6hhYZhBeZRV31VENmOq8Qw%40mail.gmail.com%253E&References=%253CCALoW1wDMV_BP%2Bb0U-W5Pp21cO1Rs6hhYZhBeZRV31VENmOq8Qw%40mail.gmail.com%253E>>wrote:
>
> > 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 <DanM@granicus.com?Subject=Re%3A%20Introductions&In-Reply-To=%253CCALoW1wDMV_BP%2Bb0U-W5Pp21cO1Rs6hhYZhBeZRV31VENmOq8Qw%40mail.gmail.com%253E&References=%253CCALoW1wDMV_BP%2Bb0U-W5Pp21cO1Rs6hhYZhBeZRV31VENmOq8Qw%40mail.gmail.com%253E>> 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
> >>
> >>
> >
>
>


-- 
Mike Shultz
Web Developer
Project Vote Smart