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My recommendation was a zip code to congressperson lookup tool. I linked to one such tool hosted on house.gov. Did you find it unsatisfactory? As to your weak

by madgar 10y ago

My recommendation was a zip code to congressperson lookup tool. I linked to one such tool hosted on house.gov. Did you find it unsatisfactory? As to your weak attempt to make this about class, I'll point out West Virginia's congressional district Google Maps overlay: http://www.sos.wv.gov/elections/Vote/Districts/Pages/Districts_Congressional.aspx http://www.sos.wv.gov/elections/Vote/Districts/Pages/Distric... Or is West Virginia too rich for you? I can find more, I just google searched that and found it in 30 seconds. It seems you don't have the time to do your own research but you do have the time to make inflammatory comments.

esbranson 10y ago
> Did you find it unsatisfactory? It does not give descriptions or representations, given congressional districts. It requires a completely disjoint input: postal districts. So unless you recommend a counterpart district-to-ZIP lookup tool, I can't see how it's useful for a description of districts because you still need to know which ZIP codes are within it to do so. Strange that the webapp doesn't use permalinks, or allow unique identifiers of districts as a search variable, no? This makes it largely unuseful for this contextual district-to-(neighborhood-level)map/description requirement. > As to your weak attempt to make this about class, I'll point out West Virginia's congressional district Google Maps overlay Well, it was more of a statement about using anecdotal examples which are not representative of congressional office websites. (It could be a statement about class, but this was not my point.) It's obvious the offices are doing these maps themselves because there exists no viable alternative, and it still appears uncommon for the offices to do so. While my remarks may be inflammatory, it is nonetheless evident that your suggestion to direct the users to congressional office websites (or dozens of unaffiliated and state and local websites), as well as a ZIP-to-district tool, would be ineffective in this context.
- madgar 10y ago
  The point wasn't to help OP generate a list of congressional district descriptions, because that's useless in general and nobody wants that. Except maybe you I guess. The OP had a list of names of congresspersons in a committee (useful) and wanted to help their audience determine if they were represented by members of that committee (useful). Most politically active individuals know the name of their congressperson or at least the name of their district, so they were already satisfied by the original list. For those that don't know who their congressperson is, they want to know who their congressperson is, not read a list of geographical descriptions of congressional districts. Which is why I recommended a tool to look up one's congressperson. You seem to be focusing very heavily on a different problem that nobody cares about, namely how to create precise descriptions of congressional districts based on geographical landmarks. If you really want a tool that generates precise descriptions of congressional districts, by all means go make one, but I don't know who would want such a tool other than yourself.

by madgar 10y ago

esbranson 10y ago

> Did you find it unsatisfactory? It does not give descriptions or representations, given congressional districts. It requires a completely disjoint input: postal districts. So unless you recommend a counterpart district-to-ZIP lookup tool, I can't see how it's useful for a description of districts because you still need to know which ZIP codes are within it to do so. Strange that the webapp doesn't use permalinks, or allow unique identifiers of districts as a search variable, no? This makes it largely unuseful for this contextual district-to-(neighborhood-level)map/description requirement. > As to your weak attempt to make this about class, I'll point out West Virginia's congressional district Google Maps overlay Well, it was more of a statement about using anecdotal examples which are not representative of congressional office websites. (It could be a statement about class, but this was not my point.) It's obvious the offices are doing these maps themselves because there exists no viable alternative, and it still appears uncommon for the offices to do so. While my remarks may be inflammatory, it is nonetheless evident that your suggestion to direct the users to congressional office websites (or dozens of unaffiliated and state and local websites), as well as a ZIP-to-district tool, would be ineffective in this context.

madgar 10y ago
The point wasn't to help OP generate a list of congressional district descriptions, because that's useless in general and nobody wants that. Except maybe you I guess. The OP had a list of names of congresspersons in a committee (useful) and wanted to help their audience determine if they were represented by members of that committee (useful). Most politically active individuals know the name of their congressperson or at least the name of their district, so they were already satisfied by the original list. For those that don't know who their congressperson is, they want to know who their congressperson is, not read a list of geographical descriptions of congressional districts. Which is why I recommended a tool to look up one's congressperson. You seem to be focusing very heavily on a different problem that nobody cares about, namely how to create precise descriptions of congressional districts based on geographical landmarks. If you really want a tool that generates precise descriptions of congressional districts, by all means go make one, but I don't know who would want such a tool other than yourself.