The FixPhillyDistricts.com local legislative redistricting awareness campaign and contest Technically Philly wrote about earlier this month has launched in earnest.

Visit the website to submit your vision of how Philadelphia legislative boundaries should look and be in the running to have your idea presented to City Council, in addition to a cool $1,000.

The project is using GIS shop Azavea’s DistrictBuilder tool based on its Cicero API. The project is in partnership with WHYY, which hosted a rousing kickoff event, and the Philadelphia Daily News.

Beyond dots on a map.

That’s the new tagline of GIS software firm Azavea, which has undergone a branding overhaul since it changed its name in March following a disputed legal claim.

As part of that move, last month, the shop based in the Callowhill neighborhood unveiled a new look to its website, completing the shift from a decade-old Avencia name to its new Azavea brand. Read about their CMS here.

The new look coincides with news that Azavea continues to expand the map they go beyond.

Already with legislative boundaries, contact and other information for the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, Azavea’s prized Cicero API now includes the United Kingdom, according to a release from the company.

The district matching and elected official lookup API, which has been used for local projects like one with Common Cause PA to offer a searchable database of political contributions, will now allow users to match addresses in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland to their corresponding legislative districts, including the U.K. Parliament, Greater London Assembly, the Scottish Parliament, the National Assembly for Wales and the Northern Ireland Assembly.

All told, the Cicero system now includes nearly 11,000 legislative boundaries and information sets on more than 12,000 elected officials.

Fresh off a name change, GIS software firm Azavea, formerly Avencia, has launched a free subscription plan for Cicero, its much-touted legislative district and elected official search API.

The plan offers users 1,000 monthly credits toward “any coordinate-based legislative district matching, elected official data lookups and/or map web service requests,” according to a release [PDF].

The company release leans heavily on suggesting the ‘Cicero Free‘ plan is for more limited organizations that want to add legislative data to their Web sites or online applications. The recently released Our Philadelphia platform, which was built by Common Cause Pennsylvania to track money in local politics, used a beta version of the free plan.

Play with it the free API here.

The Web was always supposed to be democratic. But for all the good government oversight resources online, local politics often fail to attract the spotlight of transparency.

After Hallwatch went under, Philadelphians were left without a resource for hard data about their elected officials.

It’s an issue that certainly interests nonprofit, non-partisan citizens’ lobby organization Common Cause PA. Enough so that the organization has harnessed legislative data API Cicero, the brainchild of Callowhill GIS development company Avencia, to launch Our Philadelphia. The Web site explores “the role of money in local politics and allow users to investigate these issues for themselves.”

Made possible by the Samuel S. Fels Fund, the site shines the light on local campaign contributions for city legislators. Users can create custom RSS feeds, search by address, as powered by Cicero, and track information and content relevant to other keyword searches.

So, for example, a Frankford resident might find it entirely peculiar that the top contributor to the campaign of his city Councilwoman Maria Quinones Sanchez is energy drink manufacturer Cintron Beverage, to the tune of $21,500.

While it now serves only Philadelphia, Common Cause intends to expand the database to the five-county region and include more original reporting, says James Browning, the direct of development for the group. The profiles of top donors for each elected official is the result of a year-long campaign by the group to make local campaign finance records more accessible, according to a release [PDF].

“Extracting the data from the city’s and the state’s equally crude electronic and paper archives was a job in itself,” Browning wrote in an e-mail to Technically Philly.

Other features are expected to be added to the site in coming months.

Avencia’s Cicero API, which is used to generate the address specific data culling, has made its rounds among political oversight groups.

According to a release: “it currently feeds elected district boundaries and elected official information into several public and private web applications for newspapers, election watchdog groups, philanthropic foundations, unions, arts organizations and private commercial firms.”

Perhaps the clearest example is Avencia’s partnership with the Committee of Seventy on online cudgel: the Redistricting the Philadelphia Region Web site, which lets citizens, “based on their address, look up their political districts, visualize them on a map and learn about the process of redistricting.”

Avencia also recently announced that it has extended ERSI’s ArcGIS Flex API to introduce support for OpenStreetMap, an editable map of the world, in its planning and prioritization software. Read more here [PDF].

Showing Philly's gerrymandered 5th councilmanic district

Updated: 3:51 5/7/09

Here’s a completely uncontroversial statement: the sloppy, meandering legislative districts that are used to keep incumbents in power are an embarrassment to our Republic.

Don’t worry, though, technology is going to solve that, too.

A cool, new version of a free subscription-based district-matching and legislative data API has been released by Avencia, a geographic analysis and software development firm based in the Poplar Callowhill neighborhood west of Northern Liberties.

The new version of CiceroLive, a free sample of the data and mapping tool Cicero API, which pools relevant information about political representatives at all government levels, including the district boundaries for 100 major U.S. cities, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, comes before another likely round of redistricting in 2010, with new Census data arriving then.

Cicero can be used to generate district maps that show how an address fits into the political geography of the country and more than 100 cities nationwide. Read up on why they’re using the API platform.

The most recent upgrades to the Web service and database include faster map generation, new foreign countries, non-legislative boundaries like school districts and watersheds and the inclusion of several new city council districts from places as profoundly interesting as Orlando, Florida; Tulsa, Okla.; Berkeley, Calif., and, yes, high rolling Atlantic City.

These additions coincide with a loss of local legislative information nationwide, Philadelphia most certainly included. In February, we editorialized on the need for a Web-based local government database after the shuttering of Hallwatch.org. We’ve also seen a complete halt in the once exploding Harrisburg-based state government reform movement.

No one has found that purest use for the Cicero API but not for lack of interest. Avencia boasts that many established organizations and agencies are already using the API, a number of which are regionally based.

The Greater Philadelphia Cultural Alliance created a plugin to its advocacy software to immediately know which of their supporters are constituents of what legislator. When they want their voice heard, they can mobilize a targeted group of voters and make sure those representatives hear it.

But Avencia and their Cicero API are hardly local only.

On last election day, Nov. 4 2008, Avencia says the Oregonian used the API to let their readers match their address to live vote counts for important political races in the legislative districts relevant to their address.

It was local and geographically relevant.

Now that’s news.