offer a list of representatives to write to based on an address or location

[mhl]

... or this might be called "use MapIt in Write-It".

It would be great if Write-It supported adding an MapIt instance to a given Write-It instance, so that a workflow like that on WriteToThem could be used. For example if a Write-It instance has a MapIt instance associated with it, it would offer an alternative front page allowing you to put in an address or a location (possibly based on your current position) and then only show you representatives associated with areas that include that location.

This would need quite a few changes, including

• [ ] An update to popit-django so that it also fetches memberships, posts and organisations from popit, in addition to persons. This is required because only memberships and posts may have MapIt areas added to them (adding areas to them is a mySociety extension to the Popolo spec).
• [ ] Add a mapit_url field to WriteItInstance, which can be edited in the admin interface
• [ ] Add an alternative front page for instances that have a mapit_url set, which asks for an address / postal code / location, and also offers automatic geolocation.
• [ ] A view that:
  • processes the input from that page, using a geocoder to get a longitude and latitude
  • then looks those coordinates up in MapIt with a /point/4326/[longitude],[latitude] GET request
  • finds all representatives associated with memberships or posts that have an area which matches one of the MapIt areas that was returned in the previous step
  • presents those representatives as options for whom to write to
• [ ] Similar changes at the Write-It API level (obviously it would probably make sense to support all of the at the API level first - I've just been thinking about it from the point of view of a standalone instance)

... and probably other things I've forgotten about :)

[pdaire]

I believe that WriteIt shouldn't handle location logic; Location logic should be in a third app I guess. If any, maybe PopIt should handle that because what you look for is a person; the result is a list of persons and what you do next might be other action rather than write to them. I agree that the use case of write to people based in location is a very powerful one, but the approach seems a little hardcoded to me. What if we have a third app (TA) that has a front page with a map, you click a on it, it ask MapIt for the area that cover that point, MapIt respond with the Area_id, the TA looks up in PopIt which person is related to that particular area, TA takes the person_id(s) to use them as recipients to pre-fill a form that ask for from, subject, body. Once the user fills the form TA post a json containing {from, to, subject, body} to a pre-created WriteIt instance.

[mhl]

Hi @pdaire - I take your point. As @dracos pointed out, one might well want to get a list of representatives for a location in a PMO site, so maybe it makes sense for that part to be available independently - on the other hand, it's pretty simple to do the lookups required, so may be that bit doesn't need to be reusable.

It's probably worth saying that my suggesting that this lookup should go in Write-It may reflect a view of it being more like a standalone site than an API. As I understand it, your current use of it is more as a API - so you wouldn't add themes to Write-It for new use cases (e.g. as we do with FixMyStreet), but instead make a new site that uses Write-It as a service.

If any, maybe PopIt should handle that because what you look for is a person; the result is a list of persons and what you do next might be other action rather than write to them.

On this point, PopIt already supports searching for MapIt area URLs and returning a list of people - I don't think we'd want to add querying of MapIt or geocoding into PopIt, however.

I think my main counter-argument to what you've said, and in favour of the approach I suggested in this ticket, is just that it would be very little additional code to add to make Write-It, and that would make it much more useful as a standalone site. (Needing only 3 sites or services instead of 4 for a demonstration appeals too.)

On the other hand, I think we'd be happy to go down the "Third App" approach that you suggest as well, although I'm not sure what we'd call it, "Location-based Write-It" or something :)

Another consideration is that each country (or use-case) for a site that lets you write to people based on a location would probably need some significant local customization - e.g. to find a location, in some countries it's easiest to use postcodes, in others you would want street addresses, and in others just picking from a map. I suppose you could say that that argues for the "Third App" approach that you suggest, since each front-end would need to be customized anyway.

[mhl]

To put this another way, @pdaire @lfalvarez - would you reject a pull request (assuming it was minimal and reasonably written) to add this?

I'll write an email this morning to the PoPlus mailing list to canvas opinions on what people would expect - it feels to me as if we're lacking information about user requirements for the kind of questions I raised above, and the immediate users in this case are developers who might want to take advantage of the PoPlus components.

[lfalvarez]

Hey @mhl I think that we wouldn't have any objections on any pull requests, so please go on :wink:

[tmtmtmtm]

@mhl did you have any further thoughts on this?