Our partnerships administrators have to do a lot of data collection around different points of interest. It could be finding houses of worship for OneCOP, schools for educational events, or venues for hosting events. To cut down on the amount of time it takes to amass a list of places within a certain area, we built Magnum POI. Although it is still rough and in active development, it is used regularly to quickly retrieve a list of Churches, Mosques, Synagogues, and Temples from the Google places API.
All we need to provide the staff with is a Google API Token that is scope for Google Maps and Google Places. We have also open sourced1 this project so other can use it with thier own tokens, or build upon what we have. It is very simple javascript that has been hacked together to accomplish a goal quickly. We are looking forward to refactoring and adding features over time.
Steps to use:
- Go to tech.movementforward.org/Magnum-POI/
- Enter your Google API key2 (Javascript Maps and Google Places enabled)
- Select a point on the map
- Enter a radius (in miles) for the lookup
- Select the type of organization you are looking for in the dropdown
We also have a ruby script version that we are using to automate this process for large data sets by pulling from a CSV of coordinates. We are calling it “Big Worm” after its efficicent crawling and data gathering abilites.
