DemocracyMap, State-by-state GIS e-lists
Steven Clift
communities.
One of the goals is to gather up to date district boundary data from
state-level aggregation points. Who knows of sources in various
states? Please share some links.
The goal is simple: put in address, see ALL the government
jurisdictions that serve you (or a specific location), eventually see
ALL the elected officials that serve from dog catcher on up
The approach: create an open data set with distributed input
Join the online working group here:
http://forums.e-democracy.org/groups/democracymap
Also, if you are aware of state-level GIS online community e-lists,
etc., please send links my way so we can join and post. If the online
groups are private, pass this along.
Thanks,
Steven Clift
E-Democracy.org
Steven Clift - http://stevenclift.com
Executive Director - http://E-Democracy.Org
Follow me - http://twitter.com/democracy
New Tel: +1.612.234.7072
Schrier, Bill
U.S. Census has an online lookup where you can enter your address and get back a whole host of political subdivision information. I don't have the link handy but it is somewhere on census.gov. I have used it in voter registration drives because it returns precinct number. Will look for the link and send it along if you think it useful.
-bill
Bill Schrier, CTO, City of Seattle
Thumbed on my BBerry 206-255-2156
Thanks,
Steven Clift
E-Democracy.org
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Philip Ashlock
I'm curious which census lookup service you are thinking of. If you could find that link, I'd really appreciate it. While the census does provide raw data, the only lookup services that I'm aware of the government providing based on census data are some obscure WFS services from the USGS and the new FCC Census Block API.
That said, the main focus of the DemocracyMap project is to aggregate and serve local jurisdiction information which is more local than what the census provides. The most local the census gets is municipal and school district boundaries whereas the Washington State Secretary of State maintains information on a wide range of hyperlocal boundaries for the whole state, see http://pages.e-democracy.org/DemocracyMap_Officials
The best public service I've seen so far in the US is Cicero: http://www.azavea.com/Products/Cicero/LiveSample.aspx
In the UK hyperlocal boundary information is centrally managed for the whole country, so it's not too hard for people to build sites like OpenlyLocal, eg: http://openlylocal.com/wards/1392-Wembley-Central
As for state-level GIS online communities. I think the main one is NSGIC, but I don't think they have any public lists if they have a list at all. I have some contacts there that I've been meaning to touch base with regarding this. They also manage a national GIS inventory that will be an essential resource to leverage for contacts when this project gets more legs. Individual state-level gis coordinators are also listed at http://www.nsgic.org/hottopics/state_reps.pdf
Best,
Phil