Exciting to (finally) see a freely available Web service for looking up Member of Parliament in Canada based on a postal code.

Historically, the various licensing costs and restrictions on the data required to support this service made it hard to provide as a "free as in free beer" service to organizations that wanted to make use of the data in advocacy applications and so on.

It seems those barriers have been lowered, as Cory Horner from the How'd They Vote team announces the service and speaks to the licensing questions:

I am pleased to present, at long last, a Postal Code to Member of Parliament web service:

http://howdtheyvote.ca/news.php?i=free-postal-code-lookup-service

Sadly the raw data cannot be shared, but fortunately the terms of the licence dictate that its use in a web service is permitted.

Russell McOrmond, a pioneer in this area, pressed Cory about lookups based on geolocation, i.e., enabling an end-user to click on a map and receive information on their Member of Parliament (made difficult by the nature of riding boundaries). And it appears that Cory has added that functionality to the API also, so that latitude and longitude can be used instead of postal code in the API query.

The geeky among you might want to also know that the service using PostGIS as the spatial database.

Exciting times in Canada, as geeks start to put the Web services in place to enable more democracy-enabling technology.

(Thanks to Civic Access for the info.)

Cross-posted from the New Internationalist Tech blog

While asking for input on the New Internationalist redesign process the other day, one of my friends replied (in jest) “Is ‘crowdsourcing’ the new ‘design by committee’?”

It got me thinking about why I’m excited by open and transparent design processes, and how concepts like crowdsourcing are exactly the opposite of design by committee. (Well, sometimes.)

For me, the excitement stems from a passion for learning. I like to “see inside the tent” and to learn about how others approach the same challenges I face in my work, for example: How to build successful online advocacy campaigns, How to produce compelling Web properties, and How to develop impact-filled, sustainable, Web strategies.

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Looking south of our borders, we can see the impact of the concentration of media ownership; the Telecommunications Act of 1996 lead the way by allowing a company to own multiple media properties (including multiple properties in the same market). However, thanks to the work of the Prometheus Project, a further loosening by the FTC was stopped in 2004. The compelling argument for not loosening the regulations further: concentration of ownership means less ownership diversity. Put in plain words, it means that people like you and I will not have access to the public airwaves. (And, if you’re part of a traditionally “under-represented” community — forget about it.)

It’s totally inspiring to see someone like Steven Clift — a person dedicated and passionate about the possibility of more accessible global democracies — be recognized by an organization like Ashoka. He writes:

The Ashoka fellowship will allow me to dedicate myself full-time to E-Democracy.Org for at least the next three years - no more subsidizing my passion with my often exhausting consulting work while trying to juggle the wonderful obligations of a new father and husband.