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Represent

Find your elected representatives in New York City — Saturday, 10th January, 2009

Represent is a new website prototype from the New York Times that provides New York residents with information about the whereabouts of their elected representatives. What's interesting about this website is that it's one of the first large-scale sites to implement GeoDjango for spatially-aware applications. This week, I spoke with Derek Willis to get some details on their implementation of a Django project at one of the worlds' most famous newspapers.

Vital Stats

• Utilises large sets of mapping data with GeoDjango
• Only 5 models required - GeoDjango makes working with geospatial data quite simple
• Built by just two developers in their spare time

The Down-Low

Derek Willis and Andrei Scheinkman both work for the New York Times in its Interactive News Technologies group, a team of developers and journalists building web applications both for breaking news and long-term projects.

Traditionally, the Interactive News Technologies group has implemented projects using Ruby on Rails. For a recent internal technology challenge contest at the Times, Derek and Andrei put together their Represent project in their spare time using Django, earning an honorable mention. After the 2008 presidential election, the Times committed to launching Represent on nytimes.com.

Derek had chosen Django over Rails for two reasons. Firstly, Django was on the radar from his previous working life at the Washington Post (with Django co-BDFL Adrian Holovaty. Secondly, Django's GeoDjango module made the task of loading official GIS data and retrieving areas based on addresses "dead simple". Whilst working on Represent, Derek says he learned a little about other GIS utilities for Ruby on Rails, however "our comfort with Python made Django an easy choice".

Represent is intended to make it easier to find out information about your elected officials: who they are, and what they're doing. This information is sourced from various data feeds and loaded into the GeoDjango database. The team use Django's standard admin interface to manage officials and districts, however the public presentation uses the heavy lifting of GeoDjango. The LayerMapping utility (which links GIS data sources such as shapefiles to Django models) is described by Derek as a "killer feature".

Despite their history using Ruby on Rails, Andrei and Derek didn't find any real warts with Django beyond needing to ask a few questions when it came to writing custom template tags. Moving forward, aggregation in the ORM is high on the teams wish-list.

The New York Times Interactive Technologies Group are regularly producing new projects, mostly powered by open source software. Other than Django, they also make use of major open source projects such as Apache, PostgreSQL and PostGIS. Libraries that help make life easier include BeautifulSoup (for HTML parsing) and fabric (for deployment). The Times embraced the decision to use Django, helped by the fact that many projects are deployed on Amazon's EC2 so a new deployment stack wasn't required.

So what's next? Derek tells us that they will be "adding a lot more data sources to Represent, and we've got some upcoming projects involving Congressional data, so stay tuned!"

Thanks

Special thanks go to Derek Willis for this interview.

Represent can be visited at http://prototype.nytimes.com/represent/. It is also listed at DjangoSites.org.

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