Who Represents Me: NYC
The "Who Represents Me: NYC" online service allows New York City residents to easily find their elected officials. The service is a joint effort between the Center for Urban Research at The Graduate Center / CUNY and the League of Women Voters of the City of New York and has been developed with the support of the New York Community Trust.
Visit "Who Represents Me: NYC"
The League provided the primary content featured at the site: updated lists of elected officials and their local contact information. This information was based initially on the League's They Represent You brochure (which you can order here). The League will be updating the information periodically -- and we welcome your updates if you are involved with elected office in New York City. The Center supplemented this information with data from Sunlight Foundation and the Open States project, specifically contact information and photographs of state legislators and congressional representatives.
The Center developed the application and is hosting it via the Graduate Center's server infrastructure. The service is an update to the original "Who Represents Me" service developed by the Community Mapping Assistance Project (CMAP) at NYPIRG in the late 1990s.
Anyone can use the service, Tweet about it, post it to Facebook, and/or embed it at their website or blog. To obtain a location-specific link to the list of representatives, or to create the code for embedding, click the "LINK / EMBED" option at the top of the page. Please let us know how you're using the service!
Geographic data sources for the service include:
- district boundary files for state Senate, Assembly, and Congress from the New York State redistricting task force (LATFOR) website; and
- boundary files for City Council, Community Districts, and boroughs from the NYC Dept of City Planning's Bytes of the Big Apple website.
The geographic data representing district boundaries is hosted at cartoDB. The overall site design relies on the Twitter Bootstrap framework. In May 2019 we updated the site to use the NYC Geosearch API from the Planning Labs at the NYC Dept of City Planning, which provides an open source approach to access superior address information for New York City. We coupled this with a customized basemap from Mapbox combined with Mapbox's "Static API" for the thumbnail maps that are now displayed with the list of elected officials.
