open-austin/project-ideas

Public Redistricting Tool for Texas

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JoaquinGonz commented

What problem are you trying to solve?

In every redistricting cycle in the last half-century, Texas has been found to have intentionally discriminated against racial minorities and violated the Voting Rights Act. A federal court finding intentional discrimination in the 2011 process highlighted “[t]he exclusion of minority member and public input despite the minority population growth, the misleading information, the secrecy and closed process, and the rushed process.” This typical closed-door process with backroom deals between politicians undermines Democracy. Instead of voters picking politicians, you end up with politicians picking their voters. In the past, the highly technical and resource-intensive nature of drawing legislative maps has compounded the lack of transparency and public participation. In considering whether to take the extraordinary step of putting Texas under federal supervision, a court recently admonished that “given the record produced in 2011, the State must implement a process that, by any reasonable definition, is ‘fair and open.’ . . . Texas would be well advised to conduct its redistricting process openly, with the understanding that consideration of bail-in is always an option for whatever federal court or courts may be tasked with review of future legislative actions.’”

This project would seek to take existing open-source resources and develop user-friendly Texas-specific applications to facilitate participation in the 2021 redistricting process. The main components would be tools for analyzing legislative map proposals and make comments and suggested amendments, as well as tools for individuals and community organizations to submit their own regional district schemes.

Who will benefit (directly and indirectly) from your project?

All Texans will benefit from a more transparent and inclusive redistricting process. The most direct beneficiaries will be community organizations and individuals we work with to develop map proposals and offer critiques of proposals offered by legislators. Individuals with their own interest in the issues and technological resources will also directly benefit from the applications. Part of the ultimate implementation of this project will include working directly with traditionally technologically under-served communities to ensure they have a voice in a process that has historically disregarded them.

What other resources/tools are currently serving the same need? How does your project set itself apart?

Although there are some open source repositories with the base components of mapping and analysis tools, there is no freely available Texas-specific application that allows individuals to meaningfully interact with maps or create their own. Districtr allows users to draw Texas federal congressional districts based on 2010 census data, but does not allow users to draw state legislative districts and it is unclear that the site will be updated in real time as new census data is made available. This project will also work directly with the Texas Legislative Council to ensure that there is the ability to seamlessly take legislative mapping proposals as they are produced and deploy them on this public platform with analysis tools.

Where can we find any research/data available/articles?

http://www.districtbuilder.org/
https://districtr.org/
http://gardow.com/davebradlee/redistricting/default.html

What help do you need now?

Initial help identifying the most promising technologies, and identifying specific needs in terms of skillets and resources.

What are the next steps (validation, research, coding, design)?

Finding team members with technical expertise to identify more concrete next steps.

How can we contact you outside of Github(list social media or places you're present)?

joaquin@texascivilrightsproject.org

Project management

Checklist for NEW ideas 👶

Hey, you're official! You're now part of the growing civic hacking community in Austin. Here's a few things to get started (a couple you've probably already done).

  • Create this idea issue
  • Flesh out the who, where, and what questions above
  • Start the conversation about this idea on Slack Replace this link to the #general channel with your project's preferred channel.

Checklist for ACTIVE projects 🔥

Let's get this project started! When this idea starts taking off, the Projects Core Team will start helping this project's lead(s) out with project management and connecting you to resources you may need. To get there, please complete and check off the following:

  • Post an update at least once a month to this issue. Use BASEDEF for ideas, but it's ok even if your update is just "nothing new happened this month" or "we saw a small increase in traffic to our app this month". If there's no activity for two months, that's no problem, life happens. We'll just label this as backlog so others know you'll get back to it when you have the time. If nobody hears from you at all in more than two months, we may mark it as abandoned so that others can pick up this idea and run with it.
  • Take 30 minutes to complete Open Leadership 101
  • Create a GitHub repository. Ask for help setting up permissions if you want your repository to be within the Open Austin Github organization.
  • Create a README file in your project repository. This file should help newcomers understand what your project is, why it's important, and kinds of help you're looking for.
  • Create issues to describe each task that you plan to do or need help with and how a contributor can get started on that task. You might start and stop a lot, so consider issues as your to-do list.
  • Create a team for your core contributors
    • This will make it easier for you to manage your github repo access. People on a team have the same level of access. Admin access will allow your trusted contributors to make changes as needed.
    • You can remove and add people to your team as needed.
    • View some of our teams: https://github.com/orgs/open-austin/teams
    • Note: You can also allow collaborators outside of your team and give them more limited access.
  • Create a user group in Slack so you can "@" your core contributors all at once, without bothering other people who use the Slack channel. You'll need permission from a Slack admin, so just mention @Leadership on Slack to get this set up.
  • Create a Google Drive, Dropbox, or other cloud storage to share larger files. Github and Data.World are good for code and data, respectively, especially when you need version control. But they're not good for very large files, documentation, articles, etc. A cloud storage option will allow you to easily share, create, and collaborate on documents with your team and help organize ideas and thoughts.
    • Doing this early on can help your team stay organized and to onboard new contributors who wouldn't have access to files you all have shared over email.

Checklist for FEATURED Projects 🎉

To have your project FEATURED on Open-Austin.org, complete the following documentation. In past projects, well-documented featured projects have more contributions than other projects.

If you get stuck at any point, feel free to reach out to the leadership team on Slack by adding @Leadership to your message. We're here to help you make real changes to our city.