Redistricting informational app

msarahan commented 6 years ago

What problem are we trying to solve?

Politicians cheating people out of their vote with gerrymandering - and the lack of political engagement that allows this to continue.

Who will benefit (directly and indirectly) from this project?

Hopefully everyone in America. Directly, we'll be able to inform people quickly how they are being represented, and how redistricting affects that rep's actions. Indirectly, as redistricting gets more fair, I'm hoping we get some more sane, centered politics from all sides.

Where can we find any research/data available/articles?

I gave a presentation at Open Austin in October: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1w0rpAlB5NQgZDRgT9Tv1g7vPNw2LRwhLkC72xAtkQ6E/edit?usp=sharing

There's a boatload of links in there that are a great place to start.

What help is needed at this time?

Some initial work was done at the DNC hackathon on Nov 4, 5. Our concept sketches/pitch are at https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1HXDQ67ZLWtnrXCVowDRLvg6qKtMfgRGzEsBMNmGzO0E/edit?usp=sharing and there's a github org with our work at https://github.com/FairDistricts

What are the next steps (validation, research, coding, design)?

The UI needs the most work. I think this means:

refine design of web interactions
Some web dev to step people through the process
More work on the map view to incorporate more data sources, and add the UI interaction, as far as entering in address and having zoom level set

Project management

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joshavenue commented 6 years ago

@msarahan , I am a UI/UX designer introduced by Vickle O'Dell from Open Austin. My portfolio : http://zensite.design My email : joshzensite@gmail.com

msarahan commented 6 years ago

@joshavenue great! thanks for posting. I'll be at the hack night tonight. I'll be interested in connecting there if you're around.

capndave commented 6 years ago

Do you still need help with this? I've got lots of time at the moment and this sounds worthwhile. Following josh's lead:

My Portfolio: davethompsonisme.com My Email: capndavet@gmail.com

I'm available to come to the work day tomorrow if you'd like to chat or if there's something for me to work on.

msarahan commented 6 years ago

Yes, I'll be at the workday tomorrow, and I'll look forward to chatting. I don't know exactly what there might be to work on right now, but let's talk about it. I'm still exploring the technical details of how to plot lots of data together, and trying to get all of the software to do said plotting written. That plot is going to be cute and useful to nerds, but not a powerful storyteller in and of itself. What I'd really like help on is the development of websites or similar that use the map plots to tell stories. These websites will also guide technical requirements of the plot, in terms of what the plot must support for user interactions.

capndave commented 6 years ago

Mike - sounds good. I'll be there close to ten but have to run at 11:30. Hope to see you then

On Dec 1, 2017 11:39 AM, "Mike Sarahan" notifications@github.com wrote:

Yes, I'll be at the workday tomorrow, and I'll look forward to chatting. I don't know exactly what there might be to work on right now, but let's talk about it. I'm still exploring the technical details of how to plot lots of data together, and trying to get all of the software to do said plotting written. That plot is going to be cute and useful to nerds, but not a powerful storyteller in and of itself. What I'd really like help on is the development of websites or similar that use the map plots to tell stories. These websites will also guide technical requirements of the plot, in terms of what the plot must support for user interactions.

— You are receiving this because you commented. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub https://github.com/open-austin/project-ideas/issues/118#issuecomment-348559455, or mute the thread https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AObnZd-yd5n1eKOPCxz1445VCMRlCdQ7ks5s8DnbgaJpZM4QVV9n .

tom-montgomery commented 6 years ago

@msarahan I can help with mapping back end if need be

msarahan commented 6 years ago

@tom-montgomery sounds great, I'll look forward to talking more with you soon. I think the next meeting I'll be at is https://www.meetup.com/Open-Austin/events/245784256/ - Feb 26. Might you also be there? If not, let's find a different time to talk.

msarahan commented 6 years ago

Small project update:

I attended a gerrymandering workshop last weekend: https://www.ma.utexas.edu/users/blumberg/gerrymandering.html

I was part of the hackathon. There's a lot of facets to the problem. One common uniting theme among many of the district analysis and simulation is representation of the subunits (census blocks, VTD's, precincts, etc.) in a adjacency graph (i.e. nodes and edges). This is what lets the mathematicians and computer scientists play their games to say whether districts are fair, and compute alternate districts based on some optimization parameters. It also lets them call politicians' bluff on the reasons why they say they drew maps in a given way. The simulations can be run with those stated reasons, and if the given map is highly unlikely to be generated with those stated reasons, but likely to be generated with other reasons in place, then the politicians are in trouble.

Anyway, I hacked on tools to help go from the polygon representation of those units to the adjacency graph. The repo is at https://github.com/gerrymandr/adjacency-graphs

I also connected with James Santucci, a developer at Azavea, who is reviving DistrictBuilder. It is possible that some of the work that has been done so far with mapping here may feed into DistrictBuilder.

jplaut commented 6 years ago

Hi @msarahan,

I'm a total geo data nerd and recently just put together a map of the new 2018 Pennsylvania districts that I hope to use to educate PA residents of changes that might effect them. I love the idea of creating a tool that people can use to see redistricting in action and possibly learn about the reasoning behind it.

In terms of background, I'm a fullstack web developer with a strong focus on Ruby on Rails and ReactJS. I have lots of experience with data processing, mostly using Node and Python. I also have a good amount of experience with open mapping libraries and Mapbox in order to visualize geographical data.

You can take a look at a district map I developed here: https://vote.foundation/find-my-district

I'll be at the hack day tomorrow and will be looking for projects to work on. Hope to see you there, but if not, maybe we can connect outside of the group. Let me know what you think.

msarahan commented 6 years ago

@jplaut I'm not sure if I'll be around tomorrow. My parents are in town visiting. There is a group of people interested in this sort of problem meeting roughly weekly right now. Our next meeting is probably going to be on Thursday. Email me at msarahan@gmail.com and I'll copy you on any communication there.

jplaut commented 6 years ago

Hey all,

TL;DR I created a tool for PA voters to visualize the change to their district, given the new 2018 redistricting, and find their new reps based on that. Check it out and let me know what you think!

https://vote.foundation/find-my-district-pa

For those interested:

For the data, I pulled the most recent shapefiles from the PA gov't website (http://www.redistricting.state.pa.us/), transformed it, and loaded it into a geospatial Postgres DB capable of geocoding addresses and reverse geocoding lat/lng to the new PA districts. To my knowledge, it's the first interactive tool of its kind to do this.

I have an API layer to the DB that I would be glad to provide access to if anyone is interested in using the data. I also built the platform to be to be flexible enough to handle future redistricting shapefiles. I hope to be able to use this to visualize, and thus inform, voters as to how redistricting will effect them personally.

The API is in Ruby on Rails, DB is Postgres with the Postgis extension, the map was created using Mapbox, which is built on Leaflet.

Let me know what you think!

mscarey commented 5 years ago

I believe this project was more about visualizing the arguments about gerrymandering that were current prior to Justice Kennedy's retirement, and the playing field has apparently shifted a little since then. There was a really good update about it on the fivethirtyeight podcast. I'm marking this project inactive.

open-austin / project-ideas