Black Representation - Equity Gaps at the City Level

[sonyabea]

Community Experiment Planning - Black Representation at the City Level

What problem are we trying to solve?

Movement for Black Lives (the Black Lives Matter policy arm) is trying to decide where to invest in a long-term strategy to take over local government - 5 to 10 cities - and show what it can look like when their progressive platform (https://policy.m4bl.org/platform/) is implemented.
We can look at the share of elected officials that are black, trying to identify places with large black populations but have white governance (Fergusons is one of many places in the country where black communities have only white elected officials)

Who will benefit (directly and indirectly) from this project?

If we pulled the city level data, those looking to focus energy on the places most in need of local change. We could also make a public version of this map and do the identical analysis for Asian and Latino as well, to help orgs highlight places where there's particularly low representation, given the population.

Where can we find any research/data available/articles?

We pulled every census place in the county where at least 1/3 of the population is black and appended a whole bunch of other data, most importantly, what share of the local elected officials identify as black.
The problem -- we could only find complete data down to the county level, from an awesome project called WhoLeads. Data is here: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/0ByMcyHDzO5eBdWVURVdYWENWblE?usp=sharing
We need data at the city/school board/etc level to be able to compare apples to apples but that data doesn't exist anywhere aggregated nationwide.

I removed the proprietary data from the M4BL map, it's here:
https://sonya.carto.com/builder/a43548fc-2fab-44f3-ba6f-db96d7a9f708/embed

Here is the back-end census data:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/17ueUwvjEHWQ5MJK0cVQEctXwslsUNyIpLvsPD9Y1iNc/edit?usp=sharing

www.runforoffice.org/ to find/scrape the election and filing date for these offices

What help is needed at this time?

At the Data for Black Lives conference, we discussed collecting the city level data as follows:

• building a scraper for local volunteers (within key states or counties) to take a "first pass" at collecting twitter profile pictures, google image research, etc. The program/scraper could take input from the volunteer (elected office names and select state) and the list of municipalities from the spreadsheet and return the list of potential current elected officials, by municipality and office name with image.

What are the next steps (validation, research, coding, design)?

Project management, build a web scraper that volunteers would use to scrape data from Twitter/Google

How can we contact you outside of Github(list social media or places you're present)?

sonyabreynolds@gmail.com
karl@teamblackbird.org

Project management

Checklist for NEW ideas 👶

Hey, you're official! You're now part of the growing Progressive HackNight community. Here's a few things to get started (a couple you've probably already done).

• Create this idea issue
• Flesh out the who, where, and what questions above
• Start the conversation about this new idea on Slack (this project uses #general )
• Respond with at least one update on this issue within the next month

Checklist for ACTIVE projects 🔥

Let's get this project started! When this idea starts taking off, the Progressive HackNight Team will start helping this project's lead(s) out with project management and connecting you to resources you may need. To get there, please complete and check off the following:

• Post an update at least once a month to this issue. Use BASEDEF for ideas, but it's ok even if your update is just "nothing new happened this month" or "we saw a small increase in traffic to our app this month". If there's no activity for two months, that's no problem, life happens. We'll just label this as backlog so others know you'll get back to it when you have the time. If nobody hears from you at all in more than two months, we may mark it as abandoned so that others can pick up this idea and run with it.
• Create a GitHub repository and Slack channel for work.
• Create issues to describe each task that you plan to do or need help with and how a contributor can get started on that task. You might start and stop a lot, so consider issues as your to-do list.
• Create a team for your core contributors
  • This will make it easier for you to manage your github repo access. People on a team have the same level of access. Admin access will allow your trusted contributors to make changes as needed.
  • You can remove and add people to your team as needed.
  • Note: You can also allow collaborators outside of your team and give them more limited access.
• Create a Google Drive, Dropbox, or other cloud storage to share larger files
  • Github and Data.World are good for code and data, respectively, especially when you need version control. But they're not good for very large files, documentation, articles, etc. A cloud storage option will allow you to easily share, create, and collaborate on documents with your team and help organize ideas and thoughts.
  • Doing this early on can help your team stay organized and to onboard new contributors who wouldn't have access to files you all have shared over email.

If you get stuck at any point, feel free to reach out to the leadership team with an email to steering@progressivehacknight.org or come find an organizer at a HackNight. We're here to help bring great ideas to life!