Le portail francophone de la géomatique

Bonjour

Le site fundrace.org publie la liste des contributeurs aux campagnes
electorales democrate et republicaine, avec les adresses. Cela leur permet
d'offrir une recherche par proximite (a qui vos voisins contribuent-ils ?)
et de cartographier les contributions (les republicains en rouge...).

Une nouvelle demonstration de la puissance des outils SIG : ce site est tres
parlant, alors que la simple liste publiee par la commission electorale est
tres peu consultee...

Cela pose aussi la question de l'equilibre entre la liberte d'information et
le respect de la vie privee.

Voir l'article publie dans le NY Times :
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/20/techn … na.html?th
(Il faut s'inscrire pour acceder. L'inscription est libre et gratuite).
Les principaux extraits ci-dessous.

Cordialement

Georges Bertrand

Street Maps in Political Hues
By TOM McNICHOL

Fundrace was created by a small team at Eyebeam, a New York-based nonprofit
arts organization that focuses on emerging technologies. The basic data at
the site - the names, addresses and occupations of contributors and the
amount of money they have given to a presidential candidate - is part of the
public record and supplied by the Federal Election Commission.
But Fundrace takes the information further by subjecting the location data
to geocoding, a process that assigns a latitude-longitude coordinate to an
address. Once a donor's address is pinpointed, it can be searched according
to its proximity to any other point - say, your address.
All of a sudden, campaign finance is not some abstract thing, said Jonah
Peretti, 30, the director of research and development at Eyebeam. You're
actually able to see that the guy on the third floor of your apartment
building gave money to Kerry and your boss gave money to Bush and one of
your co-workers gave to Edwards.
The site also presents several indexes that use census data to rank
candidates by the characteristics of their contributors. A GrassRoots Index
shows who has received small contributions from all over America (President
Bush is first); a Devotion Index shows who inspires repeat giving and
financial sacrifice, (Mr. Bush is first again); and a FatCats Index ranks
who gets large contributions from the wealthiest Americans (Senator John
Kerry is tops).
The site features maps of the top 10 donating cities, showing Democratic and
Republican contributions as blue or red circles superimposed on a street
map. The map of Manhattan clearly delineates geopolitical fault lines - the
bulging blues of the Upper West Side squaring off against the red of the
Upper East Side, the blue Lower East Side giving way to the red of Wall
Street.
Fundrace also ranks the top buildings for presidential contributions in each
of the top 10 cities. New York's top Democratic building is the El Dorado at
300 Central Park West, the graceful twin-towered apartment house between
90th and 91st Streets, responsible for ,600 in Democratic contributions.
The city's top Republican building is 85 Broad Street, the home of the
investment firm Goldman Sachs, whose managing directors accounted for most
of the ,500 that went to President Bush.
Fundrace goes further than some Web sites by displaying contributors' full
addresses on its first results page, rather than just the city or ZIP code.
It has received hundreds of complaints about the addresses, and dozens of
people have asked to have their own information removed.
Fundrace has declined to remove any addresses on the grounds that they are
part of the public record and can be found (with a little digging) at the
election commission's Web site.
Obviously, we don't want people being stalked, but the address information
is already pretty widely available online, Mr. Peretti said. And posting
the address does give you an interesting window into electoral politics.
http://www.fundrace.org/