A DemocracyMap demonstration app has been submitted to NYC BigApps. You can see the submission and vote for it on the NYC BigApps site listed as DemocracyMap NYC. Since the app can’t be changed while voting and judging occurs, a separate copy of this app was created to display the latest updates. This can be found at: http://beta.democracymap.org
The app includes a mobile stylesheet, so it should also be easy to use from the web browser on most smartphones.
DemocracyMap is an initiative to better coordinate local boundary information and offer simple interfaces to discover and understand all the civic entities for a specific location. In the United States it can be very difficult to navigate or discover relevant civic information – particularly information associated with local government jurisdictions. This is true even on the most basic level. It’s challenging to know anything about what’s happening in your city council or community board because you don’t even know how to identify the city council or community board that represents you.
DemocracyMap aims to solve this problem by connecting citizens and journalists with the civic institutions and government bodies that represent any given location.
To do this, we plan to spread the tools that make it easier to manage, publish, and consume this information and we also plan to develop open standards to help aggregate and unify this data across disparate systems.
You can read the full Knight News Challenge proposal for DemocracyMap, but for now most activity is on the mailing list and wiki at:
You can also experiment with some relevant open source code and browse the apps and websites that are trying to address the challenges of DemocracyMap.
