Conferences
NCSL - Redistricting 101
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Tue, 09/28/2010 - 11:01If you want to understand what is really involved in redistricting, there is probably no better place to go than the National Conference of State Legislature's (NCSL) National Redistricting Seminars. They had a seminar on redistricting in the spring in Austin Texas and are just wrapping up a redistricting seminar in Providence, RI.
"The National Conference of State Legislatures is a bipartisan organization that serves the legislators and staffs of the nation's 50 states, its commonwealths and territories." Around 250 legislators, staffers, and other interested parties attended the seminar in Rhode Island. Many were folks who have vast experience in redistricting and others were new to the process.
The first session was "The Redistricting Lexicon and an Introduction to Redistricting Law" presented by Peter Wattson, Senate Counsel in Minnesota and a leading expert in redistricting. Mr. Wattson has given this presentation many times, and several attendees had heard it before. They remained attentive, listening for new information for the coming redistricting. Others, like myself, soaked up as much as we could.
He started off differentiating between reapportionment and redistricting. He explained the need for redistricting and provided important background information. While we do not yet know the results of the U.S. Census, which will determine how many Congressional seats each state gets, it is expected that states in the Northeast are likely to lose Congressional seats as states in the Southwest gain. This reflects changes in where people live and seeks to maintain the important one person, one vote rule.
Mr. Wattson spoke about the history of gerrymandering, or creating districts to the advantage of one party or another. He described methods involved, including packing a district so that as many members of a minority party are placed in a single district, as well as fracturing, where the lines are drawn to break up the power of the minority across districts.
He then spoke about methods of limiting gerrymandering, including limits on what data can be used, who can create the districts, and what the review process should be. He also spoke about the different criteria considered for congressional districts from state legislative districts.
It seemed as if a general consensus of many attendees was that everyone will gerrymander as much as they can get away with. Related to this was the belief that whatever plans are created are bound to end up in the courts.
Perhaps the most important take away for anyone involved in redistricting is to make sure that the criteria used for redistricting is clearly understood and explained ahead of time. These include making the populations of each district as equal as possible, making sure that the plans do not violate the Voting Rights Act, respecting existing political boundaries, respecting geographical boundaries, like rivers or mountains, minimizing the changes from one redistricting plan to the next, and making the districts as compact as possible. In all of that, you can be sure that unless you have a true independent and nonparitisan commission, there will be efforts to make sure that the political power of different groups is also maximized.
Everyone should spend time learning more about redistricting, whether it includes attending an NCSL seminar, reading up on the web, or speaking with state legislators about how redistricting will be done in their state. There is a lot more to redistricting, which I hope to include in coming articles.
Starting to Look at Redistricting
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Sat, 09/25/2010 - 08:53Next year, State Legislatures around the country will be dealing with redistricting. Many people don't spend a lot of time thinking about the political districts they are in, but for some insiders, this is a crucial issue. Political districts can be drawn to support the party or parties in power. Insider partisan operatives seek to gain the upper hand in state elections in preparation for redistricting battles.
It is an important issue that I admit I don't know as much about as I would like. I understand the desire of incumbent parties to try and use redistricting to hold onto or strengthen their incumbency. I understand the basic rules of population equality, contiguity, and compactness, but there is a lot more that is worth exploring.
One starting point is The Redistricting Game, the created at the USC Game Innovation Lab for the USC Annenberg Center for Communications. The game takes you through several different redistricting scenarios, starting with the fundamentals of redistricting, going through partisan gerrymandering, bipartisan gerrymandering, looking at the voting rights act and looking at potential reforms, such as the Tanner proposal. The game is fun to play, but you have to be careful about your browser blocking it as a popup.
What is especially nice about the game is that it provides valuable links to articles and resources about redistricting. Included in this are links to Common Cause's Redistricting page,(Note: My wife is a senior organizer for Common Cause in Connecticut), FairVote's Redistricting page, as well as a link to an algorithmic approach, Splitline districtings of all 50 states + DC + PR.
While I like the idea of a shortest splitline algorithm, I am concerned that it may not take into consideration historical or geographical considerations of why a district should be drawn one way or another.
The game simplifies the process by using a state with four congressional districts and not delving into the issues of 151 assembly districts, such as we have in Connecticut.
For people more interested in redistricting issues, the National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL) is holding a National Redistricting Seminar in Providence, Rhode Island starting Saturday afternoon. Saturday is day in which various redistricting software providers. This includes big players like ESRI, ARCBridge's DISTRICTSolv, Caliper's Maptitude, and Citygate. Citygate's website states that they have been awared the "State of Connecticut Redistricting Software, Support and Training Contract".
Also listed is The Public Mapping Project. This is an open source mapping system which I hope to install and write more about later.
Various people have written various efforts at algorithmic redisticting, such as the shortest spline algorithm mentioned above. "A Programmer and Citizen" from Boston has B-Districting, a website with a blog, as well as various redistricting solutions. Check their Connecticut Congressional Redistricting map. It has some interesting similarities to the Splitline CT Map.
So, I'm off to play more of the redistricting game, try to set up the Public Mapping Project on one of my servers and then try to catch some of the NCSL National Redistricting Seminar. I hope to have lots of interesting things to follow up with soon.
Are you following redistricting issues where you live? Do you have helpful links? Know about other interesting conferences? Tried any interesting software? Share your experiences.
Podcamp Reflections - #PCCT
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Wed, 09/22/2010 - 17:44We are rapidly approaching PodcampCT and if you are quick, you may still be able to register for the early bird reduced price. As we approach the day, the discussions continue to flourish about exactly what PodcampCT should be like.
PodcampCT Pre Registration
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 09/17/2010 - 15:38We are now a month away from PodcampCT. All that is left are some small details to be ironed out. So, we have decided to open up pre-registration. People who register early will be able to attend at a discount and will be helping us by giving us a better sense of who will be coming.
Please, if you can make it to PodcampCT, consider pre-registering.
#digiday - The Future of Apps
Submitted by Aldon Hynes on Fri, 09/17/2010 - 11:07One of the panels at Digiday Social was "Is The App The Future of Social? . Perhaps it would have been better named, "What is the future of apps?"
Adam Broitman, Founder and Ringleader of Circ.us said that 80% of free apps that get downloaded do not get used on the second day, and only 5% are still in use 30 days later. He compared apps to the early days of AOL. Apps are convenient, but eventually, people want more open systems.
As an innovator/early adopter with a Nokia N900, a cellphone that is great for application developers that want to work with open source software, I am an outlier. I have a little over 100 apps loaded on my phone. They are all free apps and I use many of them very frequently.
On the other hand, every day I get several pitches for the latest new iPhone app. With over 250,000 application in the app store, it is hard to get noticed, and I suspect there are a lot of apps that are either duplicates or simply wastes of time.
I regularly respond to these pitches asking if there are plans to make the apps available on Android, Blackberry, Maemo/Meego, or as HTML5. Typically, the response is that something like that is in the works.
This illustrates two issues that apps developers need to face: cross platform development and apps discovery.
Right now, there are two major apps stores, one for the iPhone and one for Android. There are plenty of other apps stores around. An article in Rethink Wireless about HTC's latest move mentions
Verizon Wireless... is divorcing its Android V Cast Apps storefront from the generic Android Market and preloading its own apps storefront.
Another Rethink Wireless article talks about Nokia and Intel showing off updated app stores.
Purnima Kochikar, VP for Forum Nokia, the developer community, was pushing the line that she was "empowering developers, not chasing app store numbers".
The article talks a little bit about the Intel AppUp Center and mentions Meego in passing. It doesn't get into the issue of repositories that Maemo and Meego developers argue about. Yet the architecture of Maemo and Meego facilitate anyone to set up their own repository or app store.
The Nokia and Intel strategy is focused on Qt, a cross-platform application and user interface framework. The idea is that you can build an application in Qt and then compile it to run on any device that supports Qt. This is a great idea and if Broitman is right might be some of the direction that apps development is heading, except that iPhone and Android are not set up well for Qt applications yet.
There is one project that looks really interesting. It is Android Lighthouse which allows you to compile and package Qt applications for Android. I don't have an Android phone to play with right now, so I haven't tried it out, but it looks really promising.
There is also the Nitdroid project to run Android on the Nokia tablets, like the N900. I may install that at some point, but it repartitions the whole microSD card, so I'm waiting for a chance to explore this in more detail. When I have time to really explore it, I just might build some Qt apps to run on my N900 and see if I can get them to run under Maemo, Mer, Meego, and Nitdroid.
While I like Qt as a potential cross platform development tool, others at the conference suggested that ultimately everything will move to HTML5. I see several issues with this. Applications need to access information that might not be available to HTML5. Simple location information from a GPS might be available, but some of the more interesting bits of location information, such as the altitude might not be accessible. Things like the cameras, the accelerometer, the battery usage, or other tidbits of information from the mobile device might also not be available. In addition, I am concerned that HTML5 and Javascript or AJAX may run much more slowly that compiled Qt applications.
One application that I use quite a bit is Dorian, an eBook reader for the N900. I am reading eBooks that are stored on the N900. It is true that using lighttpd, or the file: protocol, I could make the books available online to an HTML5 application, but that seems like overkill. Things like books, music, pictures and video may be best accessed directly from the device.
Back to the issue of discovery, this is a key issue, not only for apps, but for many things people search for on the Internet. I hope to write more about the broader discovery issue soon. One panelist suggested that if discovery of apps is an issue, you need better control over the app stores. Yet Apple's control over its app store does not seem to have helped. Instead, it seems like you need better discovery mechanisms.
This takes us back to Broitman's comment about Apps being like AOL. As Google and Yahoo made it easier for people to discover the content they wanted online, they left the walled gardens of AOL and more people started creating webpages outside of AOL. It is reasonable to expect something similar will happen as it becomes easier to create new apps and search more locations for apps.
Apps should be an important part of marketers' strategies. For the time being, they might be able to get away with staying in the wall gardens of Apple. However, the smart players will explore cross platform apps and always fall back to an HTML5 page for mobile devices that don't support their apps.
So, if you are pitching a cool new app to me, be prepared for my question about cross platform capabilities, and know that I'm unlikely to write about it unless it runs on the N900 or has an HTML5 page.
