hello (introduction) and my own project which i'm hoping i can merge at least ideas from ("autoredistrict")

[Kevin Baas]

Hello, I've just joined the group.

I decided to join because i have been workng independantly on my own open-source district building software, at: https://github.com/happyjack27/autoredistrict

My project differs in two major respects:

* it's fully automated, rather than user-designed - it uses the genetic algorithm with annealing to evolve near-optimal maps.

* it's a client application, rather than a web page (particularly, a java application)  (because of the large amount of memory and cpu the genetic evolution takes, that part at least benefits from being run client-side.)

After trying talking with government people from a few states, i figured it may be more fruitful to try to integrate my ideas into an existing, popular technology, that's less of a drastic shift from human-generated to computer-generated maps.

I'm hoping some of my ideas, at least my metrics (and particularly the 2 fairness metrics: proportional representation and equal voting power, and my compactness measure (weighted inverse isoperimetric quotient).

Also I think it would be cool to add on top of that, a way to look at a database of suggested redistricting plans, and sort/rank them by their different scores.  That way one can get a more objective sense of what maps are the fairest.

Overall I'm interested in improving the ability to objectively score the plans, and compare different plans objectively.

So, that's me!  Hello everyone!

-Kevin

[Brian DeRocher]

Kevin,

I had a similar proposal a few months ago, but I haven't heard anything back. I suppose the team leads are busy or have moved on.

If I can find time, unlikely, I could fork the project and get it installed on my server. But for now, I'll wait.

In school I was amazed with genetic algorithms, so i look forward tonsee ing a real one in action.

Cheers,
Brian

Brian
http://derocher.org/~brian
http://mappingdc.org

[Robert Cheetham]

Kevin,

Sorry for the slow reply. We didn't have much traffic on this list, and the DistrictBuilder project doesn't currently have any ongoing funding so it's on hiatus from a development standpoint, and we don't actively check the list.  One of developers mentioned that there were some unanswered questions, so I'll do my best to respond.

DistrictBuilder has one automated redistricting feature that helps an editor to finish a plan by identifying and automatically allocating blocks that have not yet been assigned to a district.  Completely automating the development of a plan is generally a long-running operation and would require more resources, as you mentioned.  DistrictBuilder does have support for this type of longer-running operation by using a queuing system based on Celery, but I don't think we currently have any plans to implement the kind of genetic algorithm approach that you described.

Existing tools:  the most commonly used desktop redistricting tools in the US are probably Esri ArcGIS and Caliper Maptitude.  Both platforms support extensions and customization.

Metrics:  DistrictBuilder does support integration of new metrics and has the infrastructure to support new compactness and other fairness metrics.

Sorting and Ranking: DistrictBuilder supports scoring, sorting and ranking as part of the features that support operation of public competitions.  Scores (including weighted composites of multiple metrics) and ranks can be displayed in leaderboards for DB configurations that have the competition features turned on.

We would welcome enhancements to the platform in the form of pull requests, but it's a complex platform, and we don't have a lot of bandwidth to answer a lot of questions about configuring and deploying it.

There are other software projects that support automated redistricting, and they might also be worth taking a look.  In particular, Micah Altman (MIT) and Michael McDonald (Univ of Florida) were both the originators of the DistrictBuilder project and, prior to that, the developers of an R program, Better Automated ReDistricting (BARD).  There is a paper on the project at http://www.academia.edu/2756089/BARD_Better_Automated_Redistricting  The source code is available on Sourceforge with a mirror at the CRAN GitHub site.

Micah and Michael are both members of this list, but, like me, they may not be actively monitoring it.  If you are interested the BARD work, I'd encourage you to get in touch with them directly.

Best,

Robert

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Azavea

[Kevin Baas]

Thanks Robert!

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