I'll be in NYC on Monday, March 29
Steven Clift
Hey all, I after Transparency Camp in DC March 27-28, I am heading up
to New York City (anyone driving, I could use a lift and potentially a
place to stay) to meet with the Ford Foundation. (They are funding
this: http://e-democracy.org/p3 )
I'd like to connect with a group of open government and tech advocates
over brunch or lunch perhaps on Monday, March 29. Topic: What is so
important online in local democracy that it should be universal to all
communities? (And how do we get there.)
Anyone game to help organize something?
This is me: http://stevenclift.com
I run: http://e-democracy.org
And we host the online group for: http://e-democracy.org/citycamp
I share via: http://dowire.org and http://twitter.com/democracy
Cheers,
Steven Clift
sromalewski
intrigued by the Local Who Represents Me Experiment (http://pages.e-
democracy.org/Who_Represents_Me). My team at NYPIRG did this in New
York City a decade ago and sustained it through 2006. We used the
"Who Represents Me?" tagline (though our URL was www.MyGovernmentNYC.org,
to avoid people mis-reading whorepresentsme.org).
Here's the news release announcing our service (http://web.archive.org/
web/20020805210500/www.cmap.nypirg.org/webmaps/
Who_reps_news_release.htm) and here's what the interface looked like
circa 2002 (http://web.archive.org/web/20020802125541/
www.cmap.nypirg.org/webmaps/MyGovernmentNYC.htm). As far as I know
the service was terminated after our project -- the Community Mapping
Assistance Project (CMAP) -- ended, but amazingly there are still
websites that reference it (see
http://www.google.com/search?q=who+represents+me+nypirg&sourceid=ie7&rls=com.microsoft:en-US&ie=utf8&oe=utf8&rlz=).
The service was incredibly popular. Now that it's offline, I still
get numerous requests (now at the CUNY Graduate Center) from local
organizations who want to match their membership list with City
Council districts.
Over the years I had pitched the Convio's and GetActive's of the world
to include a local option for district matching in their systems, and
connecting with local services in whatever city a group was working to
do the district-matching (in NYC it would've been CMAP, but we didn't
have designs to expand our effort nationwide, so the door was open to
others -- if GetActive, etc developed an API, we and others would've
tapped into it). The response I received was that it would've been
too complicated/resource intensive to modify their systems to include
a GIS-based district matching effort for local districts, so it never
happened (which you note in your e-Democracy description).
I think the real issue with the GetActive-like companies was that
district-matching (and the resulting targeted lobbying efforts) was
never the main goal. Those systems were mainly focused on getting
people to join a group via an online advocacy pitch, collect addresses
and emails, and therefore build the lists for the client group so they
could follow up for fundraising (in other words, if the person was
committed enough to send an online message to a legislator, they'd
likely be interested in helping the group financially). The fact that
a message was also being sent to a legislator was almost secondary.
And the "district matching" that was (is) done was ZIP Code based. If
a ZIP Code was split among districts, messages were sent to multiple
legislators. Another example of being less concerned with legislative
accuracy and more concerned with just getting that person's email and
giving them the perception of actually making a difference.
No question it's a challenge to do local district matching nationwide.
And it may be the case that there isn't a strong enough local market
to make that investment worthwhile. But given the advance of
technologies (online GIS/mashups, web services, etc), I think it makes
great sense for someone like Ford to fund an effort to help develop a
service that would enable local advocacy to leverage 21st century
technology.
I'd be interested in talking further, and I can be around for a meet
up on the 29th in NYC.
Cheers,
Steve Romalewski
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Steven Romalewski
CUNY Mapping Service at the Center for Urban Research
The Graduate Center / CUNY
www.twitter.com/sr_spatial
www.spatialityblog.com
www.urbanresearch.org
sroma...@gc.cuny.edu
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