Redesigning a map to increase civic engagement
By: Dylan Moriarty
Dylan Moriarty is a cartographer & designer who recently joined The Wall Street Journal as an interactive designer. He’s also worked extensively with the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team, & nonprofit groups like the Town Hall Project.
Town halls are a longstanding American tradition, where representatives have to listen and respond to their constituents; it’s one of the most accessible venues for expressing political views. The Town Hall Project is an open source, volunteer based initiative making it easier to locate where town halls are and how citizens can participate.
Using open data from The Town Hall Project and the Mapbox Maps API, the Mapbox Community team introduced a map last year that addressed the question that’s on a lot of American’s minds — “Where can I make my voice heard?”
That initial map was inspiration for how the Town Hall Project is currently visualizing it’s data. With help from Megan Riel-Mehan & Paolo Unger Dvorchik (of Town Hall Project) and the Community team, we’ve recently redesigned the map to solve some complex cartographic challenges.
Anyone familiar with gerrymandering knows that districts are all sorts of strange shapes. To handle these complicated boundaries and overlapping jurisdictions, we created two fills; a flush blue and a darker diagonal pattern. While we could have solved this with three color fills, the difference between Senate and House member was distinct enough to warrant a graphical change. The Senate fill was made the less visually forward of the two as it would cover the entire state.
One major difficulty involved with designing anything political is to avoid appearing partisan from color choices. We’re hard wired to accept blue= left and red=right, so you end up walking on eggshells to avoid association where there is none. In this case, while we ended up going with a light blue for branding reasons, we hoped that by avoiding the juxtaposition with any sharp reds, the association would be minimized.
Another major change we made was to classify the points themselves. Not all town halls are actually held by the representative themselves. Some teleconference in, others are held by the representative’s staff. We felt this distinction was important to be made up front, so we classified each town hall into a few categories: In-Person (blue); Call-in (green); Staff-only (pink); Activist Event (orange).
Finally, we also considered clustering the points to avoid having entire states carpeted with markers, especially during recess times. While clustering could make the map cleaner, we decided early on that seeing the exact location of the town halls from the full view was more important.
We hope this tool makes civic engagement more accessible and also holds representatives accountable to the people they represent. There are 166 representatives who haven’t held a single town hall this year.
Want to make your own map for civic engagement? Get started in Mapbox Studio, or let our Community Team know how we can help support your project.
Dylan Moriarty (@DylanMoriarty) | Twitter
Where’s your district’s next Town Hall? was originally published in Points of interest on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.