https://github.com/bhrutledge/somerville-city-council
Geographic data for wards and city councilors of Somerville, MA.
https://github.com/bhrutledge/somerville-city-council
Last synced: 6 months ago
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Geographic data for wards and city councilors of Somerville, MA.
- Host: GitHub
- URL: https://github.com/bhrutledge/somerville-city-council
- Owner: bhrutledge
- License: cc0-1.0
- Created: 2020-07-05T18:38:10.000Z (about 6 years ago)
- Default Branch: master
- Last Pushed: 2020-07-07T14:35:04.000Z (about 6 years ago)
- Last Synced: 2025-07-20T15:40:03.115Z (about 1 year ago)
- Language: Makefile
- Homepage:
- Size: 295 KB
- Stars: 0
- Watchers: 1
- Forks: 0
- Open Issues: 4
-
Metadata Files:
- Readme: README.md
- License: LICENSE
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README
# Somerville City Council Data
Geographic data for wards and city councilors with names and contact information.
Open any `.geojson` file on GitHub to view the data on a map; for example:
[Councilors and Wards](https://github.com/bhrutledge/somerville-city-council/blob/master/somerville_city_council.geojson). See [Mapping geoJSON files on GitHub](https://docs.github.com/en/github/managing-files-in-a-repository/mapping-geojson-files-on-github) for details.
There's also a [Google Map](https://www.google.com/maps/d/edit?mid=1NdzlUAOXIOcEXqEbAkA9X0g-auts70Ue). However, it might not be in sync with the files in this repo; there's an [open issue](https://github.com/bhrutledge/somerville-city-council/issues/4) with more details.
Feedback welcome on the [issue tracker](https://github.com/bhrutledge/somerville-city-council/issues).
## Build instructions
This uses the [ogr2ogr](https://gdal.org/programs/ogr2ogr.html) command-line tool from [GDAL](https://gdal.org/) to convert between formats. On macOS, you can install GDAL with Homebrew:
```
brew install gdal
```
Then, to re-download the data and rebuild the output, run:
```
make -B
```
## Data sources
The ward boundaries are available as a zipped [ESRI Shapefile](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shapefile) at .
I couldn't find information about the city council in a structured format. Scraping was suprisingly difficult due to inconsistent HTML structure and [obfuscated emails](https://www.somervillema.gov/cdn-cgi/l/email-protection#4d3e393f2837222c39212c3f2a280d2a202c2421632e2220). I ended up entering the data manually into a Google Sheet, thinking that a CSV would be the easiest thing to work with.
[Google Sheet: Somerville City Council](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1JCxK8rt9akj3HUKUE54cydyKgTsZnA9iSNZEGP_6d8Q)
The sheet includes other details, like website/Twitter/Facebook links, plus the latitude/longitude of each councilor's address, which was quick to add via a [Sheets add-on](https://gsuite.google.com/marketplace/app/geocode_by_awesome_table/904124517349) (but there's also an [open-source macro](https://github.com/nuket/google-sheets-geocoding-macro)).