ACT Election for Election Leaflets

[Alex (Maxious) Sadleir]

Here are some notes on getting election leaflets setup for ACT.

I have drawn on
https://github.com/openaustralia/electionleaflets/pull/1/files and
https://gist.github.com/1379763 to try to understand how to add the
ACT election.

I understand there to be two SQL files that have to be edited to do this.

First electionleaflets.sql to add the election and the electorates.
With only 3 electorates, I could do this by hand :)

Second the deceptively named australian_postcodes.sql which should
really be called postcode_electorate.sql ;)
We are very lucky to have DataACT now which has all the electorates
data I needed https://www.data.act.gov.au/Legislative-Assembly/2012-Electoral-Boundaries/uapx-j7cd
But as you can see from this pdf map
http://www.elections.act.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0018/1665/2012_Electoral_Boundaries.pdf
although the boundaries end at suburbs, they do not end at postcode
boundaries.

Getting postcode numbers was a little harder, having to fall back to
the ABS Postal Areas dataset
http://www.abs.gov.au/AUSSTATS/abs@.nsf/DetailsPage/1270.0.55.003July%202011?OpenDocument

After some fiddling around with Quantum GIS I finally worked out I
needed to use the Vector -> Geographical Tools -> Intersect tool to
find a polygon in a polygon.

This is what stopped me when I first heard there was going to be an
election this year - geoqueries are hard! I assume this is more
impetus for MapIt, may be easier to just make own OSM fork
periodically with LGAs etc added automatically than deal with the OSM
community licencing broohah to get that data in.
There's a national Electoral Boundary dataset seperate from the LGA
dataset in the ABS ASGS that at least for the ACT is up to date - the
postcode to electorate could be generated nationally. Unfortunately it
does not have a field to differentiate between different states so
there's another analysis required there ;)

tl;dr pull request at https://github.com/openaustralia/electionleaflets/pull/7

p.s. I had tons of trouble testing it, pull request for better readme
at https://github.com/openaustralia/electionleaflets/pull/8

[malcolm blaney]

Nice work Alex!


I struggled with the postcode data for the Queensland election too. My
solution was the greasemonkey script that pulled the data from the
abc's election website (part of my pull request you pointed to).
Unfortunately that didn't provide 100% coverage anyway.

I would be keen to have a discussion about using the ABS data to at
least get the postcode data sorted nationally, and make future
elections a bit easier to set up. If you could post links to what you
found useful/interesting that would be great.

thanks,
Malcolm.

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[Alex (Maxious) Sadleir]

So it's a mashup of the Postal Areas ASGS Non ABS Structures Ed 2011
Digital Boundaries in ESRI Shapefile Format and Commonwealth Electoral
Divisions ASGS Non ABS Structures Ed 2011 Digital Boundaries in ESRI
Shapefile Format datasets from
http://www.abs.gov.au/AUSSTATS/abs@.nsf/DetailsPage/1270.0.55.003July%202011?OpenDocument

I realised now that the first digit of the SED_CODE field
differentiates between states/territories!
NSW is 1, Victoria is 2, QLD is 3, SA is 4, WA is 5, Tasmania is 6, NT
is 7, ACT is 8,

Takes just over 12 minutes to calculate the intersections in QGIS on
an Intel i5 with 8gb of RAM.

And then you can just convert the output shapefile to CSV; here's what
it thinks the whole country's postcode to state electorate correlation
should be: https://gist.github.com/3871674

Not sure how that compares to the existing data for those states.

[Adam Kennedy]

Do you want to just do it by address?

http://geo2gov.com/ ?

Adam

On Thu, Oct 11, 2012 at 4:12 AM, Alex (Maxious) Sadleir

[Alex (Maxious) Sadleir]

Well "Crace ACT 2911" doesn't have the latest ABS data. http://blogs.abc.net.au/antonygreen/2011/09/act-redistribution-release-of-final-boundaries.html

I suspect postcodes work better in the UK to balance privacy and accuracy. For the ACT many postcodes cover two local government electorates but a street name might be accurate enough to correlate to just one.

[malcolm blaney]

That's awesome. From a quick look it seems like a good match to the current state data where it exists... but we've only had nsw and qld state electorates up until a few days ago! This goes a long way to being able to cover every future state election with only a few additional database entires.

I'll take a look at converting it to the required sql when I can, unless someone else would like to do that before I get a chance?

Also any chance you can pull the same information for local council electorates? :-)

[Henare Degan]

This is extremely awesome that you've done this Alex!

Unfortunately you've got me at a really bad time - I'm out of action for at least the next few days so I can't look at your pull requests :( Maybe Malcolm and Matthew will get time to look at it but I know Matthew's very busy too.

Another really important thing I think is worth mentioning about Election Leaflets is that, as usual, it's not about the tech :) The most important, difficult and time consuming thing with running Election Leaflets is getting the word out there. This means starting early, planning your launch to coincide with when the media switches into election-mode and pushing as hard as possible to get coverage far and wide. This is the only way to get lots of leaflets and make the project a success.

Please don't misconstrue this as me poo-pooing your efforts, quite the opposite (and I hope we can get the site up). But it's things like this that are the largely hidden but really important tasks to make these kinds of projects a success.

For the 2010 federal election we even got thousands of leaflets printed up and a bunch of volunteers went and did a leaflet drop about the website! We got over 60,000 unique visitors on that launch which resulted in over 600 leaflets but we still had plenty of electorates with no leaflets.

Some subsequent posts on this thread are touching on the greater issue - that running Election Leaflets for an election shouldn't be this hard and we should develop lots more guidance for volunteers wanting to help out for an election. I'd really like to continue this discussion as poor old Election Leaflets definitely needs some love.

Cheers,

Henare

[Nick Evershed]

Re: getting the word out, if you want me to put you in touch with the Canberra Times online guys, I'd be quite happy to do so. If they're keen to promote it/use some of the leaflets in their coverage that'd be awesome.

Cheers,

-Nick E. 

[malcolm blaney]

I agree with Henare on promotion being the hardest part.... I did an
hour long radio interview getting the word out before the queensland
election but it still wasn't well supported up here.

Saying that though, it would be great to have your A.C.T. changes in
asap but I don't have access to the master repo or the live site, so
hoping Matthew comes through with the goods :-)

[Matthew Landauer]

I'm under the gun working on the Freedom of Information site which as
you know is soft launching next week.

Ah. Everything at once! ;-)

Thanks Alex for sending through those pull requests.

I'll try to take a look as soon as I can. Hopefully that will be later
today, though I can't absolutely promise.

Let me back up and agree with Henare & Malcolm. The biggest part of
running ElectionLeaflet for a particular election is getting the word
out. With the Federal Election site, the publicity and interview were
pretty much a full-time job for several weeks. Haranguing journalists,
doing phone interviews, getting asked awkward questions on talk-back
radio - all part of the fun. The sooner before the election that
starts the better... All things to bear in mind for next time.

Anyway, I'll try to get to those pull requests later today. Sorry for
the bad timing on my part!

All the best,
Matthew

Dr Matthew Landauer
Director, OpenAustralia Foundation

232 Bathurst Road, Katoomba, NSW 2780
0424 563 655
mat...@openaustralia.org

[Henare Degan]

On 12 October 2012 12:51, Matthew Landauer <mat...@openaustraliafoundation.org.au> wrote:

<snip>All things to bear in mind for next time.

Speaking of which, there's a ticket for next times: http://tickets.openaustraliafoundation.org.au/browse/EL-205

It'd be great to get everyone to help out with this over the next few weeks and maybe put some work in to make it trivial to run elections in the future.

Cheers,

Henare