Comments and edge cases on alpha spec

[mileswwatkins]

Nice whack at constructing the spec, @scisco! Here're my comments and questions to help it along; probably won't be able to make tomorrow's meeting. Some of these issues may be of little concern for now, but figured I'd bring them up.

(Some of the below examples are based on edge cases in the US, because those are the ones I'm most familiar with. I know we're not going to cover American elections, but similar administrative issues arise in other nations.)

Directory structure

• How are we going to structure the sub-national directories? Will there be a directory structure within there? How are we going to handle duplicate names at the same admin level without an ID system (eg, Baltimore City (county-equivalent) vs Baltimore County; village of Franklin in New York State vs town of Franklin in New York State)?
• How are legislatures going to be handled? Will there be a subdirectory for each seat in a chamber? If so, how are we going to handle posts that have multiple seats? For example, if a geographic area has multiple seats in a body, such as if a ward has two seats in a city council.
• Are we going to handle subnational referendums, such as amendments to provincial constitutions, or citizen initiatives?
• Are we going to handle judicial elections (which are neither legislative nor executive), in countries where those happen?
• How are we going to handle special elections, in case a member dies or resigns and it's not the full chamber or branch being re-elected? Say in America, you'll have 30+ election dates pear year even if you just look at state and federal legislatures.
• How are we going to handle special elections, in case a member dies or resigns and it's not the full chamber or branch being re-elected? Say in America, you'll have 30+ election dates pear year even if you just handle state and federal legislatures.
• Will 2014/presidential/2 and 2014/legislative/2 refer to the same election date? If not, is there any easy way to join, say, the November American presidential election with the November American congressional election? Why don't we use MM-DD dates instead of ordinal election date IDs?
• How are we going to handle elections to super-national organizations, such as the European Union? Will they get their own "country" code?

  Data structure

• Ideally we'll have data at very fine levels, either precinct or polling station. What if these areas don't line up with the administrative areas? For example, congressional districts in America don't line up with counties, so there're effectively two different area groupings. How would this fit in with an admin1.csv, admin2.csv`, … system?
• Are we going to name/identify a precinct or polling station? Will they have their own ID so they can be compared between elections or across races? For example, checking turnout numbers at a precinct in a congressional election (admin areas would be congressional districts) vs a presidential election (admin areas could be counties).
• I would avoid using "last name" and "first name," since this dichotomy is relatively Euro-centric. For example, this legislator from the Blackfoot Nation made us rethink the first-last dichotomy for American legislative data in Open States. Additionally, there are cultures that give individuals just one name and no family name.
• What will our system be for person and location names? Will we use romanized text, or accept non-roman information? If the first, is there an ISO or other standard we're going to enforce for romanization? If the latter, what if information is provided in multiple languages for the same election, in countries that have multiple scripts?
• For the admin2.csv data and beyond, will each area have their "parent" area's name or ID listed?
• In this flat admin structure, how are we going to handle federal districts (eg, DC being both a city and a state-equivalent) and other combined administrative areas (eg, how St Louis is both a county and a city, and agglomerates the functions of both levels of government)?

[scisco]

@mileswwatkins very useful comments. I hope you can make it tomorrow.

[drewbo]

Love all of @mileswwatkins comments. In many cases, let's see where we can take a "not covered" approach in the early development while still allowing for expansion into these areas in the future (e.g. maybe we ignore Special Elections for now).

I'd prefer the metadata.csv to be a metadata.json so we can match the existing Tabular Data Package Spec from OKFN