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Who's On First constituency data for the US
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Create records for regional government councils #2

Open stepps00 opened 7 years ago

stepps00 commented 7 years ago

According to the National Association of Regional Councils, there are over 100 regional councils, COGs (Council of Governments), and MPOs (Metropolitan Planning Organizations) in the United States. We should import new records for these areas (most, if not all) with polygon geometries and appropriate attributes.

According to the map below, either the Center for Urban and Regional Policy at Northeastern University and/or the National Association of Development Organizations have geometry data for these areas. I've reached out and will update the issue when I receive a response.

References:

nvkelso commented 7 years ago

Do citizens directly vote for officers of COGS and MPOS? In my experience in California local governments (who's officers are directly voted on) nominate during council sessions representatives to these regional boards. What WOF placetype would these things have?

If we're interested in more granular constituencies generally in the same nesting as already imported, US Census "county subdivision" files often have "county" level "supervisor" districts & the like that could be sorted thru and imported.

stepps00 commented 7 years ago

No, citizens don't typically vote for officers in COGs/councils/MPOs; the goal is to import these with a "wof:placetype":"constituency".

Right now, we use "wof:association":"us-senate" to differentiate between constituency types. "Association" isn't wrong, but a different property name (maybe "subtype") would be used to query out the type of constituency; in this case it would be something like "us-regionalcouncil".

thisisaaronland commented 7 years ago

cc @migurski

migurski commented 7 years ago

The one that I'm initially interested in is SEMCOG, for which we just imported a selection of Michigan addresses to OpenAddresses. We've done a bunch of these as arbitrary geometry outlines in OA, and it'd be nice to have some kind of external ID to refer to similar to the way we use ISO and FIPS codes. Aaron helped me understand a bit about how a COG might be represented.

SEMCOG’s current record: https://github.com/openaddresses/openaddresses/blob/7662413ec/sources/us/mi/semcog.json