search

opencivicdata / docs.opencivicdata.org

Open Civic Data project documentation
https://open-civic-data.readthedocs.io
44 stars 33 forks source link

Adding government types that we have in chicago #18

Closed fgregg closed 10 years ago

fgregg commented 10 years ago

In Cook county, the sewerage district, the park district, forest preserve district, and transit authority all have separate charters and taxing authorities.

They are distinct from both the state, county, and city governments, but the degree of 'independence' varies:

The sewerage district has an elected board. The transit authority and park district have boards that are appointed by both state and local level executives. The forest preserve district's board of commissioners are just the Cook County board of commissioners.

All of these entities also have weird, often highly non-contiguous associated 'districts.' For the park district and forest preserve it's land owned by the park district and forest preserve. For the sewerage district is Chicago and other municipalities that have agreed to be serviced by the district. For the transit authority it's property owned by the authority.

Do we want all these types of governmental units in opencivicdata?

jamesturk commented 10 years ago

I think in general we'll add as many as people come up with, the only reason we want a controlled vocabulary is to avoid issues with someone calling one transit_board and another transit_agency if functionally they're the same thing.

Thanks for this!

jpmckinney commented 10 years ago

transity_authority should be transit_authority

fgregg commented 10 years ago

Come on!

On Mon, Jun 16, 2014 at 4:46 PM, James McKinney notifications@github.com wrote:

Maybe not a transity_authority (sic) though.

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub https://github.com/opencivicdata/docs.opencivicdata.org/pull/18#issuecomment-46242327 .

773.888.2718 2231 N. Monticello Ave Chicago, IL 60647

jpmckinney commented 10 years ago

:) More seriously, should it be called transit_district to match the others, and especially given that many places in the US and the world call them "transit districts" anyhow? We can also rename school_system to school_district, or simply drop all the _district suffixes and call them school, park, sewer, forest, transit, which is maybe the option that will lead to the least controversy over the choice of "agency", "district", "authority", etc. suffixes.

Re: "forest preserve": in parts of Canada, we simply call them Forest District, I suppose because you never do anything besides preserve these. Re: sewerage, there's "sanitary", "sanitation" and simply "sewer", that I can find. Since sanitation can be broader than just sewers, I figure we can go with sewer, which is less jargon-y than sewerage.

fgregg commented 10 years ago

@jpmckinney :+1:

jamesturk commented 10 years ago

making these more uniform sounds good, :+1: here as well, someone mind making a PR?

jpmckinney commented 10 years ago

Any objection to forest instead of forest_preserve? The latter seems to be an artifact of almost uniquely Illinois, based on searching:

"forest preserve district" -IL -illinois -dupageforest -chicago -"cook county" -"dupage county" -"champaign county" -"will county" -"lake county" -"byron forest" -"winnebago county" -"kane county" -"kendall county"

fgregg commented 10 years ago

I'm open. I wonder if nature perserves are another synonym, and maybe even more general.

jpmckinney commented 10 years ago

I know that individual forest districts in BC and Illinois have a governance structure. I don't know that individual nature preserves have a governance structure, or if they are more generally managed centrally. This would require more research, or waiting until a real case comes up. For now, "nature" may be overly general and cause confusion, since both "park" and "forest" sound nature-like already.

fgregg commented 10 years ago

K

On Tue, Jun 17, 2014 at 12:01 PM, James McKinney notifications@github.com wrote:

I know that individual forest districts in BC http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_forest_regions_and_districts_of_British_Columbia and Illinois have a governance structure. I don't know that individual nature preserves have a governance structure, or if they are more generally managed centrally. This would require more research, or waiting until a real case comes up. For now, "nature" may be overly general and cause confusion, since both "park" and "forest" sound nature-like already.

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub https://github.com/opencivicdata/docs.opencivicdata.org/pull/18#issuecomment-46335342 .

773.888.2718 2231 N. Monticello Ave Chicago, IL 60647