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Author Topic: Legislative Districts Progress?  (Read 9793 times)

Blake

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Legislative Districts Progress?
April 26, 2009, 08:48:41 pm
Does anyone know if there has been progress on tying in legislative district data into civicrm? I was reading that the Sunlight Foundation was making some headway, but I haven't seen anything new in a year.

Donald Lobo

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Re: Legislative Districts Progress?
April 27, 2009, 08:49:02 am

i think the dharmatech guys did a bit more work with the integration with the sunlight database (if u search for sunlight you might be able to track their forum posts). Overall i dont think a lot of work has happened in this area

lobo
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Blake

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Re: Legislative Districts Progress?
April 27, 2009, 01:24:48 pm
Okay. I was just checking. I did see this thread last night <http://forum.civicrm.org/index.php/topic,2656.0.html> where some modules for civicrm 2.0.3 were posted last year, but perhaps that's it then.

Hopefully work will continue in this area.

Donald Lobo

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Re: Legislative Districts Progress?
April 27, 2009, 02:42:59 pm

If this is important for you and/or your client, you might want to consider doing some work on it and contributing it back to the community. Hoping that someone else will work in this area and provide a solution might not result in anything for some time ...

lobo

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Re: Legislative Districts Progress?
April 28, 2009, 06:58:14 am
I had a chance to check in with one on the DharmaTech developers yesterday about this.  He said that they haven't had any reason to move forward since the last post on the other thread mentioned.  Like many people they would love to see it done, but they don't have any clients willing to support more development, and they don't have the time to do it without funding.

So it sounds like Lobo's right, it's not likely to make any progress without new energy/resources.

Denver Dave

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Re: Legislative Districts Progress?
May 13, 2009, 10:37:59 pm
We also have an interest in political districts, we are currently doing manually for Colorado House, Colorado Senate and US Congressional districts using the USPS to find the 9 digit zip code and then Vote Smart to find the districts - see our Legislative action page - right hand side - http://healthcareforallcolorado.org/?p=2

Also on the above page are links to some pretty nifty political district maps.

I sure would be great to to do all or part with a batch or automated process. In theory the 9 digit zip code can be done in batch from the USPS, but 2 of us have failed to get this to work.  It would be nice if Vote Smart and the supporting http://www.aristotle.com/ had a batch interface available.  Even something like a penny a name would mean for $50 we could do our whole 5 K contact list.

Any other information appreciated.   We are currently caught up with the manual process, but would be nice to be automated and in 2010 / 2011 with re-districting, it could become crucial.

Dave
« Last Edit: May 18, 2009, 08:48:02 am by Denver Dave »

rczamor

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Re: Legislative Districts Progress?
May 17, 2009, 10:37:41 pm
We released the Activism module last week, a framework for creating online advocacy campaigns in Drupal. We have not released the letter and sunlight integration modules to the Drupal community as of yet, but we could probably take the code we have and contribute it back to CiviCRM to create integration with the Sunlight Foundation API. I think the first step though would be a commitment to have fields for US House, state house and state senate districts added as part of the 2.2.4 or later release. Without these fields a standard part of core, it doesnt make sense to have the integration IMHO.

Denver Dave

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Re: Legislative Districts Progress?
May 18, 2009, 09:30:14 am
How can we find out more about the activism module?  I did just sign up for the Sunlight Foundation API - might help since, I have not actually met anyone that has been able to get the USPS API to work.  Perhaps standard fields for political districts might help or maybe we just specify the custom fields that we assigned for each function.

Assigning our own custom fields allows the custom fields to be grouped the way that we want in the standard add / edit screen.  In our case, we set up a separate county field so that we were able to group "CO County Name" with our other political districts on our standard add / edit screen.   We also have precinct.
« Last Edit: May 18, 2009, 09:39:18 am by Denver Dave »

Donald Lobo

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Re: Legislative Districts Progress?
May 18, 2009, 09:33:15 am
Quote from: rczamor on May 17, 2009, 10:37:41 pm
I think the first step though would be a commitment to have fields for US House, state house and state senate districts added as part of the 2.2.4 or later release. Without these fields a standard part of core, it doesnt make sense to have the integration IMHO.

Any idea why you cannot do this as a custom group / custom fields. I dont think it makes sense to have them in CiviCRM core primarily since it does not make a lot of sense from an internationalization perspective. At this stage custom groups have got most of the functionality as any of the standard fields and are also quite efficient

lobo
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rczamor

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Re: Legislative Districts Progress?
May 19, 2009, 06:44:07 am
You can find out more about the Activism module at drupalorg/projects/activism. We will be releasing the Sunlight module for it in a couple of weeks.

Lobo, that makes a lot of sense. I didn't think about the international community  ;D

petednz

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Re: Legislative Districts Progress?
May 19, 2009, 06:46:57 am
Should that be the Activizm module (sorry in-joke for the CiviCRM Manual writers!)
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pete davis : www.fuzion.co.nz : connect + campaign + communicate

Denver Dave

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Re: Legislative Districts Progress?
May 19, 2009, 09:08:39 am
Here is the link: http://drupal.org/project/activism

"Allow users to "opt-in" to an e-mail list upon taking action (integration and actual sending is up to you - we only provide a checkbox that allows them to express interest; future versions will allow integration with CiviCRM and CiviMail)"

For those running CiviCRM and CiviMail, how will the activism module be helpful?

Blake

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Re: Legislative Districts Progress?
May 21, 2009, 09:08:00 pm
The work with Activism looks interesting.

A hack I figured out earlier in the week that works for me is to put a congressional district overlay on the google mapping feature as mentioned at http://www.govtrack.us/congress/findyourreps.xpd

korzen

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Re: Legislative Districts Progress?
June 18, 2009, 11:32:09 am
Does anyone know if there is an open source database somewhere that maps zip codes to legislative districts?  If you could add a district field to the zipcodes table (I think from the location module?) it would be a pretty easy hack from there.

Donald Lobo

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Re: Legislative Districts Progress?
June 18, 2009, 12:02:40 pm

1. i assume u mean federal legislative districts, if so check the sunlight foundation website. they have a fair amount of this

2. zip codes dont match cleanly to legislative districts. there are some zips that belong to 2 legislative districts (94117 is one example)

lobo
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