John Holden
John Holden is a lawyer, consultant, and software developer currently based in London. He holds a law degree from the College of William & Mary and a master's in Environmental Policy and Regulation from the London School of Economics. He has consulted internationally on environmental and political projects, including redistricting and reapportionment projects, and on popular video games such as Retro Bowl.
Sessions
The process of drawing new political boundaries in representative democracies has generally been done with closed source software. However, a number of open source products are changing the way governments draw their jurisdictions. The QGIS Redistricting Plugin has been used to redistrict communities in the United States, Canada, and Australia, and other open source software such as DistrictR has been used to redistrict the United States in their previous cycle, significantly cutting the cost needed to participate in this activity and allowing individuals to make better contributions. At its core, the software is simple but powerful: it allows users to change attributes in an attribute column using selection tools and displays aggregate statistics for other selected columns. Join John Holden, the plugin's developer, and Blake Esselstyn, a geographic and political consultant, for a plugin demonstration and a discussion of how governments and citizen groups have transitioned to using open source software in this important political area.