Advice tied to connecting candidate data to who represents me data?

[Steven Clift]

We have a weekend http://hackformn.org project on crowdsourcing candidate data (MN state house) such as social media links and activity in addition to official info.

Are open civic data efforts here connecting to the Voting Information Project data work? I'd like to see "who won" data help lead to broader "who represents you" data down the ballot.

On that note - I tried to join some VIP google groups to ask if any Drupal modules have been developed to work with their data. The developers in our hackathon group work with Drupal. Note: http://bit.ly/openvoter

Thanks,
Steve

[James Turk]

Hi Steve-

To answer your question- we don't have any immediate plans to connect to VIP. It'd certainly be worth exploring down the line, I didn't know that they were going after the election results in the way that OpenElections is for example, but if they are that'd be a useful input for staleness of data/etc. going forward (but relying on it for actual information on who represents a person is error prone of course, so we'll continue to prefer to use other official channels for that).

[Anthea Watson Strong]

+ some other folk

Obviously, it would be awesome if VIP was also tying data to OCDIDs, but because VIP data is official and published by the election officials responsible for maintaining it, we'd either need to convince election officials to adopt the standard internally or maintain a mapping between the IDs the election officials use and the OCDIDs.  I'm hopeful we can convince election officials to start using OCDIDs as identifiers within their own systems.  In some states, election officials have to share data between jurisdictions that use different identifiers, so there's a possibility that they would find OCDIDs useful.

Most of the election night reporting standard work is being led by John Wack at IEEE under the 1622 standard.  As I understand it, Open Elections is interested in certified election results, but won't be tackling election night reporting.  

Another way to skin this fish would be to integrate on a person identifier rather than the electoral district.  I'd be interested in folks' thoughts on the value of returning a freebase ID in the Google Civic Info API for this purpose.

Anthea

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Anthea Watson Strong  

Civic Innovation, Google.org  | 312.608.2606 

[Tom Lee]

That's my understanding regarding Open Elections data, too, but I think it's possible they might be able to offer very quick reporting in some instances.

I had lunch with Derek last week and he indicated that OE's first substantial data publication would be coming soon, with OCD-IDs included for jurisdictions down to the county level. I'm optimistic that once that's out we'll be able to see a path forward for integrating these worlds.