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Map-Score

Collaboratively assessing interactive maps from government.

Want to help? Make suggestions and edits to the scoring criteria, via a pull request or issue. Thanks!

Proposal

We identify 21 (+/-) characteristics of an online map that we care about, and set up a Google Form. Then we invite everyone to rate maps as they come out, and publish the aggregate ratings.

A score out of 21 is easy to talk about. And as cities make improvements, we can re-score their maps. Could produce a nice end of year report card, is highly portable to other cities, etc.

The score is a neat way to promote the principles of good engagement maps -- in order to do the scoring, you have to be familiar with all the best practices that the scoring rewards.

We could take a page from the US City Open Data Census from the Open Knowledge Foundation in presenting our comparisons of maps.

Possible scoring criteria

Imagine each of these is worth 1 point.

Not every map will be able to score 100% -- there might be desirable characteristics for a map that aren't possible given the data/other issues. We could make a note of attributes this map isn't even competing on (for example, a partially successful map could score 10/21 while a quite successful map could score 10/12.)

How open is the map data? 4 pts

  • underlying data is accessible for bulk download 1 pt
  • data is accessible in a non-proprietary data format (csv/geojson, not ArcGIS GDB or Shapefile) 1 pt
  • data powering the map is directly pulled from an open data site via API (ideal) 1 pt
  • a complete history of all data that ever appeared on the map is kept (even if some data eventually disappears, it is still accessible in the original data source.) 1 pt

Design 6 pts

  • conforms to sticky-map standards (click-and-drag pans, double-click zooms, scroll wheel zooms in/out) 1 pt
  • pinch & zoom works on mobile 1 pt
  • can functionally jump to addresses or regions via search bar 1 pt
  • provides "deep links" so that map views are shareable from the URL bar 1 pt
  • comments or other input can be provided to report bad data, and responses are tracked & accountable 1 pt
  • it is possible to filter any layer with time data by time 1 pt

Data truthiness 5 pts

  • available at different geographic roundups/aggregations (e.g. district) 1 pt
  • normalized by area in meaningful fashion, taking into account possible statistical hiccups (like a park district with no population) 1 pt
  • legend is labeled 1 pt
  • available as the original location dots (e.g. geocoded location of 311 reports) 1 pt
  • the time of individual dots/locations is reported when available 1 pt

Accessibility 6 pts

  • available in all (?) significant local language groups 1 pt
  • fall-back for screen readers (?) 1 pt
  • works in all modern browsers without a plugin (no Flash or Silverlight) 1 pt
  • works on both iOS and Android, cell & tablet 1 pt
  • works on all desktop browsers (Firefox, Chrome, Safari, latest IE) 1 pt
  • color-blind friendly (reds/greens) 1 pt

Possible total: 21 pts

Best practices

Good online maps

Mapping Best Practices - slides from a presentation at NICAR by Dave Cole, John Keefe, Matt Stiles

When Maps Shouldn’t Be Maps - blog post by Matthew Ericson

Open data best practices

... examples of best practices for open map data?

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