The Big Picture

Phillip Smith (http://communitybandwidth.ca/) & Russell McOrmond (http://flora.ca) and I (Mike Gifford) have been working for over a month now on figuring out how we could provide tools to help map people to their politics. A national nonprofit wants easy access to the Postal Code to Riding database that we have purchased from Stats Canada. An anti-poverty group is mobilizing supporters around the upcoming provincial election and needing to mobilize support in their ridings. A large union is interested in mapping a postal code to the nearest union office. A west coast environmental organization wants to take their existing database of members and organize them by riding. All of this will be doable through an API that OpenConcept is developing to help decentralize access through the web.

The main goal here is make a more direct connection between a representative and the citizen that they are representing. MP's offices and the offices of political candidates will get more mail, but it will be mail that is specific to them. Election candidates have found that email blasts from their constituency gave them useful information about their potential supporters. It provided them with a sense of what people cared about, and also provided them with a larger list for their election newsletters.

We are still developing a pricing platform for this technology. Code is clean, but data is messy. Governments at all levels seem to be unable to set a consistent way to identify and share data about the same person or riding. So Statistics Canada has their list of Postal Code to Ridings, as does Elections Canada. Elections Canada keeps a list of MPs and Ridings, but that list isn't shared with Parliament. There are multiple ways that even something as simple as a riding name are formatted and of course there are different character sets used as folks are using a wide range of tools to collect this data. Ahh, the dream of having this information available in a single XML file that could be accessed an updated by machines rather than by tens or hundreds of people doing data entry a slightly different way.

We are also very interested in building in room to allow the development of collaborative spaces where organizations can join in to help contribute joint data. So for an election, five organizations could dedicate staff time to update a list of candidates running in an election. Information here changes regularly, so individuals could pool their efforts to create a good list of people to contact. Then the web service could provide a nice, machine readable way to make this data accessible to all of the member's websites. A similar database could be set up for media contacts -- which also require quite a lot of value added information if a media campaign is going to be successful.

There would be a couple of different services such that would potentially have different API keys such that every organization has a unique one (possibly tied to an IP address). The api so that I can set an end date at which point the key no longer works. With automated billing systems it would be fairly trivial to set up a monthly invoicing scheme.

All of the software for the PC2CSV (Postal Code to CSV) will be released. We will release as much of the data as we can to members of the consortium, but do need to ensure that there are systems in place that make the initiative sustainable. Collecting, verifying and correcting the data is very time consuming.

The consortium is trying to give people access to critical political data by bringing it all to one location, licensing it when necessary and offering it in a way that members don't have to individually purchase their own licenses. We can do this through a web service which is cost-effective, convenient and flexible for your needs.