Election Leaflets: 2013 Federal Election edition

[Henare Degan]

Hi all,

Just a quick note that thanks to a burst of Twitter activity (thanks to @purserj), and the parties getting in very early sending out leaflets, work has begun on launching Election Leaflets for the 2013 Federal election.

I've set up a version in our ticket tracker to track work that needs to be done: https://tickets.openaustraliafoundation.org.au/browse/EL/fixforversion/10700

If you'd like to help out please get in touch. The most important, and time consuming, part of running the site is not reflected in those largely technical tickets - it's the time invested in getting the word out. Of course there's also plenty of development work so whatever your skills, they can probably be put to good use :)

Cheers,

Henare

[Jake MacMullin]

I'm interested in developing an iPhone app to allow people to photograph and submit leaflets. Is there an existing API I could use?

Cheers,

Jake

Sent from my iPhone

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[Henare Degan]

Hey Jake,

That would be awesome - the whole upload process is the most painful thing right now and improving it is one of the key things we could do to get more people uploading.

Around the 2010 Federal election @cvertex started working on an iPhone app so it might be worth getting in contact to see where he was at (I'll do a Twitter intro).

We don't currently have an upload API but we can build one to suit. I know Vijay was planning to work in parallel with someone to build the API to suit how he was building the app.

The current upload process works as follows: Upload image file(s) - get key, use key to upload metadata. So that process should work well with an iPhone, i.e. take a photo, upload it in the background (get key) while user enters metadata, submit metadata with key that was returned from uploading the image in the background.

If you'd prefer it to work another way I'm happy to discuss that too.

Cheers,

Henare

[Jake MacMullin]

Is there any feed of published leaflets? An RSS or JSON feed for example? It might be nice to allow people to browse leaflets in the app too.

Cheers,

Jake

Sent from my iPhone

[Henare Degan]

Yes, RSS feeds are available for just about everything and there's a JSON API to get leaflets.

Cheers,

Henare

[Peter Serwylo]

Hey, 

I'd be happy to chip in.

I'll have to wait until I'm at uni tomorrow so that I can clone the github repo [only on 3G at home :(] and set up a local site to play around with as I'm not familiar with the admin interface at all. Looking at the requirements section in the README, I guess that is what you require some help with:

1. A list of parties running candidates
   
2. A list of categories important to this election
3. A list of constituency names
4. Mappings between postcodes and constituency names (e.g. 2042, Sydney)

My questions/comments:

1. Does this get finalised closer to the election date? I noticed Alexanders comment on EL-215, but that was just parties and not candidates
   
2. I'll wait until I play with a local install before I ask about this
3. I guess related to the GIS data from Alexander's comment on EL-215
4. As above - are you aware if there is an automatic way to do this mapping? I guess it depends on the way the .shp files encode their info.

Cheers,

pete.

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[Alex (Maxious) Sadleir]

I haven't used the new (1 month old?) admin interface either - I
suspect the Readme could use some updating once someone uses it :)
From reading the code I think this is how it works:

0. Add a new 2013 election for the 14th of September 2013.

1. Add any new parties to the list of parties Admin screen. Then tick
all national parties on the Election Edit admin screen.

I don't think any more specific information about candidates/parties
is required - a user can add a leaflet for any party in any
electorate? (Anybody want to correct me here?)
(About 10 days after the election is officially called (issuing of the
writs), the AEC will put a list on their website of which party is
running in which electorate:
http://www.austlii.edu.au/au/legis/cth/consol_act/cea1918233/s156.html
This year that would be 23rd of August, 4 weeks before the election.
So it wouldn't be especially helpful this year as the leaflets will
start earlier than that)

2. Add any new categories to the list of categories Admin screen. Then
tick all appropriate categories on the Election Edit admin screen.

There's already Climate Change etc. categories in but they are
associated with the existing elections. Someone has to make a
judgement what will be the issues for this year and map the issues to
the new election.

Now for GIS issues. I used Quantum GIS to get this information for the ACT.

3. Add electorates to the election on the "Constituencies bulk edit"
screen of the new election.

You can convert the .shp file fields into rows of a CSV file in QGIS
and then use a spreadsheet tool to just get the names of
electorates/constituancies column as required by the admin screen.

4. Add electorate to postcode mappings on the "Postcode mapping bulk
edit" screen of the new election.

There's a "Vector -> Geographical Tools -> Intersect" menu item in
QGIS to find where one polygon touches/is contained by another
polygon.
For postcodes I would use the "Postal Areas ASGS Non ABS Structures Ed
2011 Digital Boundaries in ESRI Shapefile Format" dataset from
http://www.abs.gov.au/AUSSTATS/abs@.nsf/DetailsPage/1270.0.55.003July%202011?OpenDocument
and the AEC shapefile mentioned on the ticket
This produces a third layer of intersect only polygons, which again
you can use QGIS to export the Postcode and Electorate Names as
columns in a CSV file as required by the admin screen.

[Dave Slutzkin]

Jake,

As of iOS6 there's not necessarily any need for a full mobile app, as a
web app can access the camera/photo library in a platform-independent
way on either Android or iOS. See the top answer to this question:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/8581081/how-to-access-a-mobiles-camera-from-a-web-app

My personal opinion is that dropping it into the web app is a more
elegant solution than requiring a full mobile app, but that's a matter
of preference.

Dave

--
Dave Slutzkin
Melbourne, Australia
davesl...@fastmail.fm

[Jake MacMullin]

Dave,

I'd read about the new media capture APIs. I certainly think it's worth updating the site to allow people to upload images directly.

However, I don't think it needs to be a question of either a great web experience or a native app. The two can be complementary.

Cheers,

Jake

Sent from my iPhone

[Henare Degan]

On 28 February 2013 09:09, Jake MacMullin <jmacm...@mac.com> wrote:

However, I don't think it needs to be a question of either a great web experience or a native app. The two can be complementary.

I agree, especially how a big percentage of people probably aren't on iOS6 or Android ICS.

Dave, are you interested in helping develop the web app side of things while Jake looks at native?

Cheers,

Henare

[Alex (Maxious) Sadleir]

I have uploaded CSV/TXT file results of this spatial query to
https://tickets.openaustraliafoundation.org.au/browse/EL-215

[Henare Degan]

Hey Jake and Dave,

Did either of you make progress with mobile upload capability for Election Leaflets?

That would be awesome as the current upload user experience ain't great! :)

Cheers,

Henare

[Matt Joyce]

Android versions, in the wild.

http://bgr.com/2013/02/08/android-version-distribution-february-2013-316698/

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[Jake MacMullin]

I haven't made any progress yet. I am still planning on working on an iPhone app but have been very busy for the past month or so.

Cheers,

Jake

Sent from my iPad

[Henare Degan]

Great to hear you're still planning to work on it.

I've got the site up for the 2013 election now: http://www.electionleaflets.org.au/ Thanks to everyone that helped out, I'll be doing a launch post on Monday.

Cheers,

Henare

[Jake MacMullin]

Henare,

Is there any documentation for the API? I'm currently looking through the source to see if I can figure it out but any pointers would be great. I'm after a list of the most recent leaflets in a machine-readable format.

Thanks,

Jake

[Jake MacMullin]

This looks like it might work:

http://www.electionleaflets.org.au/api/call.php?method=latest&count=10&output=json

[Henare Degan]

That's the one! Pull requests accepted for improving (creating) the API documentation :)

Cheers,

Henare

[Jake MacMullin]

Well, I've made a start on the iPhone app. It doesn't do much yet, but the code is here:

https://github.com/jmacmullin/ios-election-leaflets

Cheers,

Jake