What we’ve been up to this summer

Hello from Representable! While this summer has been nothing like we expected it to be, we’re excited to share all the incredible progress we’ve made in making our tool more intuitive and accessible than ever before.

We’re normally located in Princeton, New Jersey, but the coronavirus found our team scattered literally throughout the world. Weekly meetings found us Zooming in from places as far flung as Sydney, Copenhagen, Vancouver, and Boston as we met to discuss redistricting in the coming years. It may sound strange to have a team from all over the world fighting against American gerrymandering, but we’re all united in our goal to combat unfair districts, and we all have a vested interest in improving American democracy due to our status as Princeton University students.

Since June, we found our rhythm, onboarding new team members and getting right to work on gathering and implementing feedback from partner organizations, community members, and other stakeholders. We standardized an end-to-end process for meeting with users who have participated in a user trial for our tool to hear their unique challenges and successes when drawing their community. Users had a lot to say, positive and negative. Overall, we got some great responses from folks who found the tool straightforward and easy to understand — a key goal of ours throughout development.

“I thought it was really elegant and simple” — Cathleen (Representable.org User)

One big change we made this summer was shifting from a polygon draw tool to a select draw tool. We heard feedback from users that they found drawing a polygon to cause some confusion when mapping their community, and so we prototyped and implemented a new tool which enables users to have flexibility and responsiveness when selecting the units (census block groups) which comprise their community. I’m particularly proud of how smooth the community mapping process is with our new tool.

Yet another challenge we faced was moderation. When creating an online tool, particularly one with political implications, you have to protect against malicious activity. We’ve implemented a flagging process that allows users and organizations to report spam entries for review.

We got a lot of feedback from partners and users about the importance of sharing their maps, so we’re enthusiastic about rolling out our export functionality. Users can now export their maps as GeoJSON or PDF files, and organizations can export entire community mapping drives as GeoJSON feature collections. Therefore, communities are easily shareable and interoperable with other redistricting software. It’s never been easier to use community of interest data when drawing a district map!

The list of features added this summer goes on and on, but I’ll keep it short by adding one other major change released this week. Representable has launched functionality for all 50 states + the District of Columbia! We’re so enthusiastic to see how communities mapped through Representable all across the country can help in the fight against gerrymandering.

Looking towards the fall, there’s even more uncertainty. Much of our team is moving as we prepare for virtual semesters, gap years and full-time jobs. But no matter where in the world we end up, we’re going to keep up the fight against gerrymandering.