Maps for America
- App URL
- http://www.mapsforamerica.com/
- Source URL
- http://www.mapsforamerica.com/download
- Description
Maps for America aims to make government more accountable and transparent in three ways:
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Maps for America enables citizens, activists, and advocacy organizations to get more out of their data. They can plot locations on the map representing charter schools, shovel-ready projects, coal-fired power plants, etc. Then visitors can filter the map to display selected types of data in particular political districts. If you are concerned about affordable housing with expiring use restrictions in Massachusetts, you can go to mapsforamerica.com, upload addresses, and then quickly generate a map of the properties in, say, Representative Michael Capuano’s district. And then you can create a corresponding list of locations, to send to public officials, share with the media, etc. Points can be plotted on the map one-by-one or in large batches of CSV data.
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Maps for America also aims to supports the work of member-based and grassroots organizations by providing an easy, free tool for identifying supporters’ reps and senators. An organizer can submit a batch of addresses, then get back a CSV file in which each address returns with districts and elected officials.
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Maps for America is built with three custom Drupal modules, now available for other Drupal developers to use to take advantage of Sunlight Labs’ APIs. The Legislator Look-Up module creates a block which can be easily snapped into any sidebar, to enable visitors to look up legislators for a designated address. The District module tags geocoded website content with corresponding political districts, parties and legislators. And the Geocoder module processes large batches of addresses and then calls the District module to tag all of its newly generated content.
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This application was submitted by Bryan Hirsch on April 1, 2009