More and more our browsers know where we are and can help simplify our decisions. Many campaigns ask for your postal code as a simple means to help gain some location awareness about your visitors, however, this is rarely accurate on a smart phone and never convenient. As we've already blogged HTML5 begins to address this problem by providing a better means for dealing with location. There's a lot of new ways that sites are going begin to take advantage of this information.

One way that I've wanted to explore was with political campaigns. Most of us spend a great deal of our time in the our ridings and know which electoral district we are in even if we don't vote. However, it would be useful many times to be able to simply pick up your smart phone and figure out which riding you happen to be standing in. Say if there's a dangerous pot hole you wanted to report to a municipal councillor, but were outside of your riding. Or you wanted to tell a member of parliament where you worked that it is important to you to fund public transit. Whatever it is, if you can make it easier to put people in touch with those who are elected representatives for that region they will be more interested in your communications.

Now Vote.ca has a great system that allows you to find Canadian federal as well as some provincial & municipal electoral districts. They also have an API that allows for a machine operable way to do this, so our computers can do some work for us. I haven't spent any time verifying this data or comparing it with the postal code to riding data that we have purchased through Statistics Canada, but in my limited tests it seems to work well. It is a free rate limited service (10 requests per minute/IP address) but it should be workable for many Canadian campaigns.

I wanted to simply blend in some of the HTML5 geolocation information with this API to show quickly how powerful this framework is. I saw being able to further extend it so that we could access the name & contact information that we have on file for members of parliament through our Make the Change service. We have a similar API that we wrote a while back to interact with riding data. I saw this all being done with the jQuery library which has a lot of great client side tools for manipulating data. Using HTML5, geodata & mashing that up with two different API's to produce politically useful information just seemed to good to pass up.