DistrictBuilder

DistrictBuilder is an open source computer software developed by Public Mapping Project and engineered by Azavea, a geospatial analysis company, for drawing maps of electoral districts. Using the software, people can create and edit district plans, display demographics and election data, and show additional reference map layers.

In 2010 and 2011, the software was used by a number of citizen groups to present redistricting proposals in some US states. In addition, the software was also used in redistricting competitions organized by Michael McDonald in 6 US states.

Overview

DistrictBuilder is a web-based collaborative computer software that enables users to divide a geographical region into electoral districts, such as congressional or state senate districts in the United States, and determine the BOUNDARIES of the districts on the basis of various topological and demographical features, such as district compactness and contiguity or voter age, race, gender, income or education.

Development

DistrictBuilder is an effort of the Public Mapping project. It was conceived in 2010 by the project investigators, Micah Altman and Michael P. McDonald, who lead the development of the software. Altman is the Director of Research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Libraries; while McDonald is a Professor of Political Science at George Mason University.

Districtbuilder was first released in 2011, and continues to be developed.The Philadelphia-based Software company, Azavea, which collaborated on software engineering. The project was also funded from a Sloan Foundation grant.

Features and System requirements

The software was built using open Source Technologies that include Django, GeoServer, Celery, jQuery, PostgreSQL and PostGIS and can be hosted in different environments such as Amazon Web Services, Azavea Hosting, local Linux server.

It is a web-based open source software, it can be launched online through a web-based user interface without paying a license fee for using it. The main features provided by the software includes the ability to create and edit district plans, the use of pre-existing template plans to get started faster, import and merging of the plans from other systems, displaying demographics, election and other data, integration with GoogleMaps, Esri ArcGIS Online, OpenStreetMap or Bing maps, display of additional reference map layers, such as school districts or administrative boundaries, automatic calculation of contiguity, compactness and population statistics, on-the-fly customization of demographic, geographic and election data statistics, search for unassigned areas, drawing of communities of interest and evaluating A Plan against them, evaluating how closely a user's proposed plan matches legal requirements, saving and sharing of plans via a URL link, and the support for public competitions, scoring and leaderboards.

Use

As a general legislative practice, the boundaries of legislative districts are drawn based on the demographic data that is obtained from census figures and electoral information. Because people are recounted at regular intervals, once every decade in the US, the newly obtained data triggers electoral redistribution and reapportionment of the previous boundaries, and the need for newly drawn maps. The DistrictBuilder mapping software can be used to draw these maps by the appointed government officials.

Another application domain of the software is in demystifying and democratizing this complex and "traditionally byzantine" process that has been frequently performed in secret and used against minorities by drawing gerrymandered district maps to let a majority group outvote minority voters. Making the process more transparent and breaking the map-making monopoly held by state lawmakers can be seen as beneficial outcomes even if the maps created with the software will not be adopted by the government for official legislative use.

For that end, the DistrictBuilder software has been used by the Public Mapping Project for organizing mapping contests in various US states where the general public or student teams from different universities compete to create alternative redistricting plans using the same criteria as the officially appointed commissions and balance their competing objectives.

Awards

See also

• Political geography
• Geopolitics
• Geodemography
• GeoComputation
• Boundary delimitation
• Geographic information systems

External links

• DistrictBuilder Website
• DistrictBuilder at GitHub
• Public Mapping Project
• Azavea Software Development