09-11, 11:30–12:00 (America/Chicago), Grand F
Tufts University's MGGG team helps redistrict states, cities, school districts, and more. In 2022 we had to rewrite multiple tools to meet the size and density of New York City's population.
Districtr.org is a tool for state and local government entities to redraw districts and invite public participation. As state redistricting season was winding down, New York City started considering proposals for city council districts. We had been using MapBox vector tiles to rapidly provide population statistics, but at NYC density and zoom levels we could only upload GEOIDs. Among other changes, population calculations got moved to a server with GeoPandas. Looking forward to future maps, we'd like to consider scaling with a more resilient in-memory database, a 'digital twin' on the server, or multiple zoom levels.
The talk will cover Districtr's work in general, and this specific engineering challenge.
