SFBED is an open data project to provide baseline information about San Francisco elections in an open, machine-readable, documented, and structured form.
The end product of the project is a single, static, publicly available
JSON file (maintained at data/sf.json), along
with supporting documentation. This file is placed in the public domain.
See the License section below for details.
The JSON file provides in a structured format information about San Francisco elections that tends to remain the same from election to election. This includes things like information about the offices and government bodies that appear on the ballot, and what precincts and districts they cover.
Anyone can use this information, for example by mashing it up with other election data for your own purposes (e.g. media pieces, research projects, campaign finance reports, election results, ballot information, etc.). The project eliminates the need to manually compile this information on your own.
See here for a sample web page created from this data. If you notice any issues with the data or have any other project suggestions, please file an issue in the issue tracker.
SFBED is a project of the SF Elections Data group of Code for San Francisco.
The data is provided as a single JSON file included in this repository:
data/sf.json.
Examples of the type of information that the project aims to provide include--
- all local, state, and federal offices that appear on San Francisco ballots,
- links to the official web site of each office or office body,
- the lengths of the terms of each office, and
- district information for each office (e.g. list of precincts).
The project focus is on the information that tends to remain the same from election to election. Thus, the project does not provide information about candidates, election results, or current office holders.
To permit a higher guarantee of quality and accuracy, the focus of the project is on the information that tends to remain the same from election to election (or that changes infrequently).
The project has partial support for internationalization (aka "i18n"), which means support for multiple languages. The data provides translations of some English phrases into the following languages:
- Chinese
- Spanish
- Filipino/Tagalog (limited)
The San Francisco Department of Elections currently prints official ballots in English, Chinese, and Spanish. In November 2015, the Department will begin printing official ballots in Filipino (see here for information on the San Francisco Language Access Ordinance, or LAO).
The project would also like to add translations in the following languages--
- Japanese
- Korean
- Vietnamese
In the November 2014 election, in addition to Chinese and Spanish, the Department of Elections also made translations of election materials available in the three languages above, as well as Filipino. Translated materials included ballots and related instructions, State Voter Information Guides, and Voter Bill of Rights posters. Thus, official San Francisco translations already exist in some form, but just need to be added to the data.
Possible uses of the data include "mashing up" with or otherwise supplementing presentations of--
- what is on the ballot,
- election results, or
- campaign finance information.
For how to interpret the JSON file, see this page.
See Article XIII: ELECTIONS, SEC. 13.101. TERMS OF ELECTIVE OFFICE. of the San Francisco Charter for information about terms of offices, etc.
Resources:
Contributors should refer to the contributor documentation for additional information.
This project (with the exception of the JSON file as described below) is
licensed under the BSD 3-clause license. See the LICENSE file
for details.
The database consisting of the JSON file located at
data/sf.json in this repository is made available under
the Public Domain Dedication and License v1.0 whose full text can be
found at the file data/LICENSE.txt in this repository,
as well as at the following location:
http://opendatacommons.org/licenses/pddl/1.0/.
Chris Jerdonek (chris.jerdonek@gmail.com)