jurisdictions

Each JSON file will be automatically imported as districts and associated legislators.

To get the JSON file, you have to get shapefiles covering the districts and convert to JSON.

identify shapefiles

Search the jurisdiction name + legislature name + districts + shapefiles, gis, ERSI, or datasets

Eg: San Francisco city & county board of supervisors districts shapefiles

That will usually lead you to a site that has the shapefiles already posted or an email address for the data team you need to contact. If not, browse the government website for a tech team and contact them.

The county will often have these files for smaller cities and towns.

Converting shape files to JSON

Upload the zip file to https://mygeodata.cloud/converter/shp-to-json

Find "Coordinate system" under Output Data/Output parameters. Click "(the same as input)" and select WGS 84

Finish the conversion

Schema

Each file must have the following schema:

{
  "label": "San Francisco City Council",
  "short_label": "San Francisco",
  "locality": "San Francisco",
  "administrative_area_level_2": "San Francisco County",
  "administrative_area_level_1": "California",
  "session": 20192020,
  "districts": [
    {
      "geometry": {...},
      "properties": {
        "label": "District name",
        "short_label": "District abbreviation",
        "district": 19,
        "office_holder": {
          "first_name": "First",
          "last_name": "Last",
          "email": "legislator@email.gov",
          "phone": "(608) 825-1465",
          "username": "RepFirstLast",
          "twitter_username": null,
          "image_url": null
        }
      }
    }
  ]

Schema notes

• districts field must be valid GeoJSON.
• All office_holder fields are required except twitter_username and image_url.
• Vacant districts have "office_holder": null.
• Sessions can be any number, but best if they are concatenation of session years. For example 2020 or 20192020.
• short_label's should be 10 characters or less.