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  • Legislative District from Mapping Data
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Author Topic: Legislative District from Mapping Data  (Read 725 times)

ktatgenhorst

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Legislative District from Mapping Data
April 07, 2016, 12:08:18 pm

I focus on political candidates/parties and their use of CiviCRM. As I look around for info on Legislative districting, I see it approached from the point of zip +4 data. Zip +4 is not often collected, and I do know it can be standardized but really, this seems a tedium to list zip + 4 for each district when the districts are mapped.

I would like to work on a plugin (or hear why I should do it a different way) which uses the mapped boundaries of districts and then use geocoding data to appropriately tag database entities.


Please note, while I have looked around to see who is doing what etc... I am new to this and I am open to hearing that a different approach is better, especially if the why can be conveyed as well.

Thanks

Karl Tatgenhorst
Karl Tatgenhorst

JonGold

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Re: Legislative District from Mapping Data
April 07, 2016, 12:28:23 pm
Hi Karl,

I'm happy to report that such an extension already exists!  It's not polished enough for public release, but you're welcome to install it, see how it works, and improve on it.

Documentation is here:
https://hq.palantetech.coop/projects/electoral-api/wiki

Github is here:
http://git.palantetech.coop/palante/civicrm/extensions/coop.palantetech.electoral/

There's a wiki page on other CiviCRM e-advocacy resources here:
https://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRM/Using+CiviCRM+for+e-advocacy

Finally, I'm hoping that CRM-18928 (https://issues.civicrm.org/jira/browse/CRM-18298) will be merged soon.  Right now, the extension does legislative lookups via scheduled jobs - but it would be great to do the lookups in real-time, which will be possible once that code is merged.

Feel free to get in touch with me if you have any questions about any of this!
Jon
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ktatgenhorst

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Re: Legislative District from Mapping Data
April 07, 2016, 12:59:21 pm

I am happy to see that as well, though I am a little sad that I didn't get to solve such a fun puzzle on my first go round!

I will install it and see what happens. Is this Federal, state or all?

I ask as I would like to be able to do all (including party districts which are often different). Could I modify this one for those?

Thank you Jon for responding!
Karl Tatgenhorst

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Re: Legislative District from Mapping Data
April 07, 2016, 01:35:06 pm
This puzzle is far from solved - there's plenty of work yet to do!

This handles both state and Federal, via the Sunlight Foundation API.  The code is modular to support lookups from different APIs - and in fact we also supported the New York Times' Civic API for looking up local NYC-level districts until they dropped support at the end of 2015.  We have it on our to-do list to add support for the Google Civic Information API, which should give us local district lookups for all of the U.S..

If you'd like to add that support - or support for other data sources that are more appropriate to your use case - please fork us on Github!  It's installed on a handful of sites (3 of our clients, one of someone else - maybe others we're unaware of?) and we'd love to polish this into something we can release into the community.

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JonGold

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Re: Legislative District from Mapping Data
April 07, 2016, 01:37:05 pm
Uh - that git repo appears to be broken.  Let me check in with my coworker!
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JonGold

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Re: Legislative District from Mapping Data
April 07, 2016, 02:32:48 pm
Hi Karl,

OK, we found the problem, it was due to a recent server upgrade.  You can now access the git repo.

There's a graphical interface for this repo here: https://hq.palantetech.coop/projects/electoral-api/repository
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ktatgenhorst

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Re: Legislative District from Mapping Data
April 07, 2016, 03:21:20 pm

  Sorry to see you were still conversing and I was rudely ignoring you. My apologies.

  The plus side is, I was ignoring you so I could get this configured and working. I am having a little trouble due to some mapping issues on my site, I have not previously used mapping.

However, I have all the legislators added. I imagine I will be as functional as the plugin allows by tomorrow. Then, if the puzzle isn't solved I would be happy to see what kind of help I might provide to your efforts.

Thanks so much for speaking up on this!

Karl
Karl Tatgenhorst

ktatgenhorst

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Re: Legislative District from Mapping Data
April 09, 2016, 09:27:17 am

All the state reps for my chosen state and all the federal populated, but only people in the database who are reps have state district details.

I was expecting to see my normal membership have their legislative district indicated, is that not correct?

Thanks,

Karl
Karl Tatgenhorst

JonGold

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Re: Legislative District from Mapping Data
April 10, 2016, 02:56:33 pm
Your normal membership should have their legislative district indicated.

Have you configured the extension at Administer menu > System Settings > Electoral API?
I'm guessing you've enabled the "Legislators/Representatives" scheduled jobs - have you enabled the "Districts" scheduled jobs?  Those are the jobs that populate your district data for your normal membership.
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ktatgenhorst

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Re: Legislative District from Mapping Data
April 11, 2016, 09:42:53 am
I have configured all of those and administered it there.
Mapping is not working for me, I bet that is the problem then.
Karl Tatgenhorst
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  • CiviCRM Community Forums (archive) »
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