Whitehouse Petition Heatmap

I was reading a SlashDot article about the progress of a 'We the People' petition and thought it would be nice to see a visualization of where the signatures are coming from. I spent some time wandering around the tubes and couldn't find anything displaying the data I wanted so I set out to create one myself. Using Python (Requests, BeautifulSoup) I scraped the 'We the People' site for the data and threw the result on a Google map using the visualization library. Here are the results!

GitHub project finally here PetitionHeatmap! The cli script is able to pull any petition data so far, but please note that not all of the signatures have locations so that data isn't perfect. On some petitions though, this lack of location might be intersting data as well.

This is all a work in progress. I intend to include a few more graphed stats like top 10 cities or top 3 states and per a Reddit suggestion, a comparison against all petition signers. For those interested in the city -> lat/lng and the state polygon information I was able to locate (Jan 10, 2013) a creative commons database that includes a massive listing of cities and their coordinate locations from Geonames. I've turned that into a simple sqlite db and have included it with the GitHub project. The state information was an xml file that I got from here. If you have any feedback or suggestions please drop me a line here, I would really appreciate it XD.