Skip to main content

Democratic activists: engage your representatives

For a long time, some kind of "postal code lookup" tool has been the holy grail of e-activism. I wrote such a tool that sent faxes to MPs back in the early 2000s [the aughties?].

But here in Canada we ran into a problem: postal code to riding databases are compiled by Stats Canada and licensed under restrictive use. So in spite of various attempts to come up with a sustainable solution, they've mostly been ad hoc and fail in the long run because of the cost and effort of keeping that database up to date.

So I'd been deflecting new requests for such a tool for years, hoping someone else would solve it, until a year ago or more two of my clients said they really wanted such a tool, and it occurred to me that geo-coding had now evolved to the point where we could use a different strategy: instead of keeping a database of postal codes to ridings, we could do geocoding of addresses to latitude - longitude and then use the now freely available shape files of ridings to do the lookup. Bonus for this method - we can do lookups with partial addresses that don't have a postal code.

Fortunately, I dallied in getting started and before I could do any code, I was referred to this site:

http://represent.opennorth.ca/

which basically does all this already, and provides a machine interface for external use.

So that meant I could focus on the interface issues and leave the technical lookup to an open data web service.

But to make matters even nicer, along came this module:

http://drupal.org/project/webform_civicrm

which solves a lot of the interface problems.

All of which brings me to what this post is all about -- I've just released the 6.x-1.0 version of the new drupal module:
CiviCRM Represent Open North Integration

And that means you can now enable and encourage your CiviCRM constituents to contact their representative with a simple interface that feeds into and back from your CiviCRM database, making the process as simple as possible for them. Try this as an example:

http://www.taxfairness.ca/action/how-many-tax-dollars

In fact, it's even a little nicer that you see here, because you can generate emails to your constituents with CiviCRM "tokens" so that just clicking on the link in their email will take your constituent to a version of the form that has all their information pre-filled. Yes, it's almost bordering on zombie activism, but I mostly think that the less technical distractions the better, and it doesn't get much better than this.

Did I mention that this works not just for federal MPs but most if not all MPPs and even city councillors for some big cities?

[Update, March 29, 2013: I've just published a Drupal 7 version with more documentation]



Popular posts from this blog

The Tyee: Bricolage and Drupal Integration

The Tyee is a site I've been involved with since 2006 when I wrote the first, 4.7 version of a Drupal module to integrate Drupal content into a static site that was being generated from bricolage. About a year ago, I met with Dawn Buie and Phillip Smith and we mapped out a number of ways to improve the Drupal integration on the site, including upgrading the Drupal to version 5 from 4.7. Various parts of that grand plan have been slowly incorporated into the site, but as of next week, there'll be a big leap forward that coincides with a new design [implemented in Bricolage by David Wheeler who wrote and maintains Bricolage] as well as a new Drupal release of the Bricolage integration module . Plans Application integration is tricky, and my first time round had quite a few issues. Here's a list of the improvements in the latest version: File space separation. Before, Drupal was installed in the apache document root, which is where bricolage was publishing it's co...
Read more

Refactoring My Backup Process

A couple of weeks ago, I decided to spend a few hours on a Friday afternoon improving my backup process for my Blackfly managed hosting service . Two weeks later, I've published my ongoing work as an update to my backup-rsync project and have decided to share it with you. You might think I'm trying to compete for "least click-bait like title ever", but I'm going to claim this topic and project might be of interest to anyone who likes to think about refactoring , or who is implementing backups for container-based hosting (like mine ). Definition "Backup" is one of those overloaded words in both vernacular and computer-specific use, so I want to start with definitions. Since "a backup" is amongst the least interesting objects (unless it contains what you absolutely need in that moment), I think it's more interesting and useful to define backups functionally, i.e. A "backup process" is a process that 1. provides a degree of insuranc...
Read more

drupal, engagement, mailing lists, email

I lived, worked and studied in Costa Rica from 1984 to 1989. Ostensibly, I was there to study Mathematics at the University, and indeed I graduated with an MSc. in Mathematics supervised by Ricardo Estrada (check that page, he even advertises me as one of his past students). And yes, I do have a nine page thesis that I wrote and defended in Spanish somewhere in my files, on a proof and extension of one of Ramanujan's theories. But mathematics is a pretty lonely endeavour, and what drew me back to Central America (after the first visit, which was more of an accident), was the life and politics. The time I lived there was extremely interesting (for me as an outsider, though also painful and tragic for it's inhabitants) because of the various wars that were largely fuelled by US regional hegemonic interests (of the usual corporate suspects and individuals) and neglect (of the politicians and public) - the Contra war in Nicaragua, the full-scale guerrilla wars in El Salvador and...
Read more