[liberationtech] Fwd: [sunlightlabs] Google's new Civic Information API methods & the ID system underneath

[Yosem Companys]

From: Tom Lee <tlee at sunlightfoundation.com>

I think that most folks on this list will be interested in the new features 
that Google added to their Civic Information API yesterday:

http://googlepolitics.blogspot.com/2013/11/civic-information-api-now-connecting-us.html

In short: an address query will now get you information about who 
represents you across a truly impressive number of levels of government. 
Give it a try:

https://developers.google.com/civic-information/docs/us_v1/representatives/representativeInfoQuery

For us at Sunlight, the most exciting part is the identifier system that 
underlies the system. Our Open States team led the effort to create a 
reliable scheme that could be used to connect data about political 
representation across jurisdictions and domains. I wrote a bit more about 
it here:

http://sunlightfoundation.com/blog/2013/11/19/whats-under-the-hood-of-googles-new-civic-information-offering/

OCD-IDs are already being used by Sunlight, Google, OpenNorth, 
OpenElections and Granicus, among others. If you manage a dataset that 
concerns political geography, we hope you'll consider connecting it to this 
ecosystem by adding support for OCD-IDs. The easier these crosswalks get, 
the more powerful this data universe becomes. And adding support for these 
identifiers is painless, I promise. You can find docs and details at 
http://opencivicdata.org/

As always, we're here to help -- please do let me know if this induces any 
head-scratching.

Tom
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