Sunday, May 30, 2010

Election Day Portal

To track what is going on during election day, Georgia's leading monitoring organizations, the International Society for Fair Elections and Democracy (ISFED), the Georgian Young Lawyers Association (GYLA) and Transparency International (TI) have created a joint portal, VoteGeorgia.ge






This will join the feeds from the three organizations, while also giving you a map with region-specific information. The website has been designed by TI. NDI provided critical coordination, as well as access to survey results. CRRC is providing the maps for the effort. We work with GeoCommons to provide the data on the maps. Below a snapshot of a pre-election complaint. 




Note that the maps take time to load. They are not as fast and snazzy as Flash-based maps would be, since they get populated by data that is continuously updated, during the election day and after. Here the technology is still catching up -- we are also using this as an exercise to learn how best to make mapped information available over the Internet. 


We know there are some snags -- it does not work too well with the Safari browser, for example. Further suggestions gratefully received in the comments. This is a pilot, and we want to use this opportunity to get everything right in the future. 


On CRRC's side, David Sichinava, our GIS and Database Analyst, and Jonne Catshoek, our Crowdsourcing Project Manager, were the ones who made this happen. This work has been supported generously  by the Open Society Foundation Georgia. 

No comments: