Collect high-quality example proposals

[ericsoco]

No description provided.

[ericsoco]

Historical examples are probably best to illustrate the ability of the tool to:

• display changes (incremental/in-process and adopted) in district boundaries
• narrate intent and effect of changes
• gather and archive public feedback on proposals

Here's a list of some resources for historical district boundaries from the 2017 MLK Day Twitter thread:

• https://github.com/benbalter/congressional-districts (via @Geospex)
• https://github.com/Code4HR/proposed-voting-districts (via @jonahadkins)
• News for redistricting from all states: http://statewidedatabase.org/resources/Redistricting_News/ (via @cityhubla)
• California boundaries: http://statewidedatabase.org/index.html (via @cityhubla)
• All states since way back: http://cdmaps.polisci.ucla.edu/ (on GitHub here) (via @ljwolf)
• New York: http://www.urbanresearchmaps.org/nyredistricting/map.html (via CUNY / Steven Romalewski)

[ljwolf]

I've also got an extension of the election returns from the ICPSR linked up to @JeffreyBLewis's boundaries, giving full elections results + incumbency information matched to boundaries since 1896 or so. I think that's up in CARTO somewhere. But, since it's integral to my dissertation, I've been working with my committee on how to get it published on the OSF. Not sure when, exactly, I'll be able to open that up.

[ericsoco]

@ljwolf great. It's important to note that this project doesn't take demographic data into account; this is not a tool for drawing up new boundaries, it's only a tool for facilitating public discourse around that process. The former would be a great thing to have (there are, obviously, existing tools but they're either too proprietary and/or difficult for non-experts to use), but we treated it as out of scope here.

The discussion around whether or not the former and latter could/should be integrated is still an open one.

[ericsoco]

Just leaving a note here that I've added a script to the repo that pulls down arbitrary state + congress number from @ljwolf's data (mentioned above), hosted by @stuartlynn.