Organizational Strategy

The basic organizational model of "Map the Vote” consists of a highly skilled body of volunteers to provide central services and a loosely affiliated network of skilled GIS users throughout the country matched to local operations.

Map the Vote

The SF Bay Area is home to a very large number of democratically oriented GIS professionals.  Several dozen of these programmers, dbas, GIS analysts, techs and managers have indicated their strong desire to participate in this project.  In addition, some tasks might lend themselves to remote participation by skilled developers in other regions.  Tasks to be performed by the central organization include:

• Light weight application development and/or deployment and support (e.g. based on free GIS viewer technology)
• Application development, deployment and support (Web)
• Data Collection and development (e.g. precinct and other electoral geometry, voter and supporter lists, demographic and any other relevant data shared task with network volunteers)
• Data storage and retrieval
• Analysis (shared with network volunteers)
• Customized mapping for display
• Legal, Financial and Contact functions
• Organization and support of the Map the Vote Network

Map the Vote Network

Our goal is to match every field operation with locally based GIS volunteer talent - to be recruited from within the ranks of the client operation or through the national organizing efforts of Map the Vote.

While some GIS products (e.g. precinct maps) can be directly consumed by campaign organizations and while some tools will be developed with the non-professional user in mind it is unrealistic to expect local field operations to effortlessly adopt sophisticated technology like GIS.  Furthermore, the habits of using GIS tools to analyze and solve problems take more time to develop than is generally available in the heat of a campaign.

Matching GIS students or professionals to the local operation alleviates these problems and achieves a number of goals including:

• Assuring that the tools and data provided to the local operation are used as effectively as possible.
• Tight integration with related technical functions (e.g. non-GIS database and web functions) within the client operation.
• Providing invaluable translation of local service requests to the central Map the Vote organization.
• Providing vital estimates of local operational needs that might be filled through application or data development by the central Map the Vote organization.
• Map the Vote network volunteers working in the same geographic area will be uniquely positioned to standardize data so that it might easily be integrated vertically and horizontally within an overall operation – thereby significantly improving management information, avoiding duplication of effort and effectively leveraging collaborative resources.