Vocal Voter
Ireland | Vocal Voter
Submitted by johnh on November 21, 2006 - 14:58.
As promised, another Vovo update. I'm now sitting on a truly enormous database of addresses in Ireland. The database-minded among you will spot some horrific query times (and, for that matter, horrific queries) in what follows, and you'd be right in thinking that this database is pretty raw and needs some work. Right now I've got a seven-figure number of rows in one table.
Still... here's some screenshots of my terminal window to whet your appetites in the meantime.
Tipperary is counted twice, since you asked.
Handy info for figuring out who's a councillor of what.
Since all the addresses in this Cork street are in the same electoral division, we can replace 11 database records with just one, and still correctly identify the electoral representatives for the whole street.
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Code | Ireland | Politics | Vocal Voter
Submitted by johnh on October 31, 2006 - 17:06.
For those of you who are as frustrated as I am at the relatively slow pace of progress at Vovo, an update of sorts.
Last week I unilaterally decided to postpone the collection of more indices to electoral registers until after the site is launched -- which sounds remarkably counterintuitive since that was supposed to be how I'm resolving addresses to constituencies.
Simon McGarr and I spoke at some length at BarCamp Ireland last month about a different approach: perhaps, we thought, the famed map hack plus the OSI's DigiBoundary would get us very close very quickly?
Sadly not without dropping at least seven thousand euro. Because obviously it's a frickin' state secret which places are in which constituencies. So that idea died about two weeks back.
Anyway. I've since had another idea, and it's working. I spent some of Friday night writing code which will take another couple of weeks to finish doing its thing. So far, this new process has added another half a million people to my home-served private prototype.
If (as herself says), God willing and the creek don't rise, and nothing else goes wrong, there's a good chance I'll have a full national address-to-TD lookup working in four weeks.
That'll be the hard bit done, and we can get to sorting the writing to them part and launch the bugger -- and all in under a year from the first promise. Barely under a year, I grant you, but still.
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Ireland | Politics | Vocal Voter
Submitted by johnh on March 20, 2006 - 14:08.
The development site now covers an extra half million people compared to yesterday, since I've finished merging the Dublin Corporation's data set.
Top marks to Dublin City, by the way, for having the best data in the country. Streets which are divided between electoral areas are clearly marked as such (Cork County, by way of contrast, just lists them once in each area with no information about which parts are which). EAs which straddle constituency boundaries are divided accordingly with pseudocodes.
Yay Dublin, in short.
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Vocal Voter
Submitted by johnh on February 28, 2006 - 15:45.
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Ireland | Politics | Vocal Voter
Submitted by johnh on February 23, 2006 - 12:49.
...have residents who can determine their local eleced representatives on the Vovo dev site.
Because I've added Galway City and Galway County to the database this morning.
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General | Ireland | Vocal Voter | Webcasting: EU
Submitted by johnh on February 20, 2006 - 09:25.
...but then again I can only parse about 10-15% of it, not speaking the language as I don't. Still, this expat got a kewlness buzz from it when it showed up in my referer log.
An tImeall immortalises yours truly in the Irish language. I can read the bit about me having done something around Xmas, and having recently moved from England (Shasana) to Cork (Corcaigh).
Not sure I like the look of that John Bull clause though :)
(Incidentally, I've been here since August, and I'd really rather people didn't refer to me as English, what with my Scots family and my Irish passport and my sincerely-held belief that multicultural London and overwhelmingly-right-wing-and-backward England are best mentally seperated. I'm obviously in no position to tell whether that's being said, being Gaelige-ly challenged, but just in case...)
I've left a comment/appeal there which I'm happy to repeat here: IMHO VocalVoter must be bilingual and I'll need more volunteer help to make that happen.
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Ireland | Politics | Vocal Voter
Submitted by johnh on February 17, 2006 - 23:56.
The Vocal Voter prototype now also covers Leitrim.
Adding a second county required a whole bunch of UI work which counties three through 26 won't now require.
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Ireland | Politics | Vocal Voter
Submitted by johnh on February 14, 2006 - 23:56.
It's not finished, but then again I have often found that posting something here is the next best thing to never telling anyone.
It contains only streets and townlands in County Mayo.
It allows you to find out who your TDs are. It does not yet have the whole faxing-people thing going on.
Clear? OK.
I've knocked up a prototype. It's at http://dev.vocalvoter.com . If you live in Mayo, you may find it useful :)
If you want to help us scrape up the data we don't yet have, join the list and then get into the wiki to find out more.
If you care about the details, it's Drupal 4.7. The Ajaxy live search thing is generated by my new Street.module's implementation of Drupal's new autocompletion hook.
And I'd just like to say, for the record, that figuring out fecking MySQL's cackhanded UTF8 handling cost me nine hours of my life last night that I will never see again.
Still. Pretty, isn't it?
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General | Ireland | Politics | Vocal Voter
Submitted by johnh on January 31, 2006 - 22:14.
My Pledgebank effort on the FaxyourTD project has jumped from 10 to 13 today thanks to some judicious pluggery by the likes of John Breslin and Mick Fealty. I still need two more before tomorrow to make the Pledgebank deadline.
Update, 27 hours later: Success! 21 in the end.
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General | Ireland | Politics | Vocal Voter
Submitted by johnh on December 11, 2005 - 19:31.
Several days passed, so here's a progress report on my efforts to port Writetothem and make it work for Ireland.
You'll want to read this because I've got something wicked cool to show you at the end.
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