Politics and Elections Blog
Trends, tools and news from the Google Politics & Elections team
Getting Data From the Ground To the Cloud
Wednesday, June 29, 2011
Last week, the Google Earth Outreach and Google.org teams, in collaboration with the
Global Canopy Programme
, hosted partners from non-governmental organizations (NGOs) for the first gathering of the Community Forest Monitoring Working Group. The goals of the working group are to provide a platform for groups engaged in community forest monitoring activities - across continents - to share knowledge and experience. Equally important is for these groups to provide recommendations for the development of tools, methodologies, and common protocols. For example, the Surui tribe in the Brazilian Amazon is using
modern technology
to implement their community’s Surui Carbon Project.
This effort isn't isolated, as many NGOs and stakeholders support community-based approaches to forest monitoring for their efficiency, cultural relevance, and reliability. Community Forest Monitoring will play a role in the United Nations’ Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) effort which aims to incentivize developing countries to adopt a low-emission path to development. In thinking about best methods for data collection, this working group is tackling a host of data collection issues including usability, security, accountability, cultural relevance, and scalability.
These are all concerns that the team at
Open Data Kit
(ODK), an open source suite of data collection tools, have fleshed out and iterated upon. ODK was born in 2008 as a Google sabbatical project of University of Washington computer science professor Gaetano Borriello. Borriello wanted to take advantage of Google’s data collection tools: maps, visualization, databases and has said that his team saw a gap in mobile data collection. Thus, Borriello’s team developed ODK Build, ODK Collect, and ODK Aggregate, mobile tools that have attracted thousands of users and dozens of active developers.
As ODK iterates and evolves, the Public Sector Engineering team is learning about the challenges and opportunities in mobile data collection and exploring how we can contribute to this space. ODK already
gives users the option
to visualize data in Google Earth and Google Fusion Tables, and we are exploring how to take advantage of some of Google’s other tools (what if photos collected on the ground could be easily posted to Picasa, or videos to YouTube?) It’s our goal to make sure that all meaningful data is effectively organized and made discoverable, accessible and usable.
Ultimately, community forest monitoring represents just one slice of the potential that effective data collection tools create. ODK was initially motivated by the needs of community health workers and has proven flexible enough to be used to track everything from
human rights violations
in the Central African Republic to
water quality in Ghana
. As the nature of scientific research diversifies and the volume of data collected increases, reliable, flexible, and lightweight tools will become more and more crucial.
What’s next? As the engineering teams continue to work on improving mobile data collection tools, this working group will convene policymakers at the next workshop to discuss standards and best practices. “The greatest barrier isn’t a technological one, but the challenge of leveraging this data so that communities can help ensure better governance for their forests,” says Niki Mardas, Head of Strategy and Communications for the Global Canopy Programme and
theredddesk.org
. As with many other public data collection efforts, it will become the job of advocates and analysts to shape meaningful narratives and press for the change the world needs. We're proud to be playing a part in this effort and we're committed to working with our partners to transform data collection from a passive, closed process into an active and empowering one.
Posted by Tanya Keen, Google Earth Outreach and Jenny Ye, Public Sector Engineering Intern
Visualizing Election Results Directly from the Ballot Box
Wednesday, June 15, 2011
This past Sunday Turkish citizens went to the polls to cast their vote at a critical juncture in their country's history. After the polls closed, voters across the country turned to Google first to understand the results and the impact of the election. Providing access to useful information like results for elections are closely aligned to Google’s mission and help improve democracies across the globe. In Turkey, the team at Google helped visualize and explore the latest election results as they became available. Using
Fusion Tables
and the
Google Maps API
, our elections team built a
gadget
that displayed province and district-level results in real-time “directly from the ballot box.” To facilitate this, we partnered with
Cihan News
who recruited 50,000 volunteers to provide real-time election data and received praise from voters and other media outlets for their quick and accessible reporting of election results.
By making it easy for multiple collaborators to integrate data, create visualizations and work with a variety of data types, Fusion Tables allowed us to quickly build a prototype. We created tables with static content such as district shapes and names and separate tables with dynamic content such as the number of votes received and counted ballot boxes. We wrote a simple program to periodically parse Cihan’s XML feed of results and populate the dynamic content tables. We then were able to merge both the static and dynamic tables and visualize them directly in Fusion Tables without writing a single line of new code. As soon as Cihan uploaded the data, we were ready to visualize. The result was a quick and easy mashup that we could check for accuracy.
The gadget was built using
PolyGonzo
, an open source library for the Google Maps JavaScript API. PolyGonzo provides fast rendering and highly interactive polygons in most modern browsers using the HTML5 canvas element and GeoJSON shape data. From Fusion Tables, we exported the static content for Turkey’s 957 districts to KML and we then converted the shapes into simplified GeoJSON. Using the Fusion Tables JavaScript API, the gadget also periodically read from the same dynamic content tables we used to build our prototype. The end result was an engaging gadget whose static and dynamic content could be traced back to Fusion Tables.
We hosted the gadget off of
Google Project Hosting
. By 7:30 in the evening local time we were seeing over 500 queries per second to load the gadget’s static content from Project Hosting and over 1000 queries per second to load the gadget’s dynamic content from Fusion Tables - both astounding figures. As evidenced by the
volume of updates on Twitter and elsewhere
on election night, Turkish voters were indeed eager to share the details of the election outcome courtesy of this custom mapping platform.
Projects like this help people around the world view and explore information and also allow people to collaborate and merge different data sources. For instance, a tech savvy reporter could incorporate publicly available socioeconomic or past election data to the Fusion Table and use the Google Maps API to overlay the data directly onto the existing map. The web holds much promise to continue to transform politics and elections from a passive process to an active, participatory one. The elections team here at Google will continue to seek solutions and build tools and platforms to help inform and connect voters and candidates across the globe.
As evidenced by this latest project, Google is committed to partnering with and helping news organizations succeed online and off. The Turkish election results gadget is the first of many election visualizations we hope to create in the future. Soon, we’re creating an election results specification so any news organization can provide the public data and can work with us to provide visualized and - importantly - searchable results on election day. We can’t wait to see what tools and products we can cook up together for elections around the world!
Posted by Chetan Sabnis, Software Engineer, Public Sector Engineering
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