With the European elections coming up, I canvass my neighbourhood for the French UDF party, as a French resident in the UK voting for local councils and European parliament. Canvassing my neighbourhood is a classic travelling salesman problem, that is: where are my compatriots and how can I best reach them?
The French electoral list I received from the Consulate is confidential of course. What is shown below is what I carry around on my smartphone to canvass, but not to share online. Here is what I did to achieve this:
- cleaned up the electorate file to have name, address, postcode and email in neat columns (you will not believe how such data are kept and circulated, I suppose it's how people entered it in the first place)
- uploaded the CSV file to arcgis.com which then geocoded the post codes
(as per previous post on rail station use, post codes are the smallest geo entity freely available) - I did not share this as data is not for public use, and no one else can access this but my login
- downloaded arcgis.com on my msartphone and access this private file to guide my canvassing:
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| click image to enlarge |
But in order to share this with you, here are further steps I took:
- downloaded the Ordnance Survey VectorMap District - TL for my post code
- projected vectors from British National Grid to Web Mercator as arcgis.com
- stripped the shapefile file to only street address so they post but anonymously
- uploaded both files to arcgis.com and voilà! you can see what I see here:
View Larger Map
Is that a cool web app or what? It's as easy as...
- load a spreadsheet to geocode quickly&easily on arcgis.com
- read it on my smartphone to help me canvass m neighbourhood
- clean it and strip it of any secure info to share publicly with you
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