The McCourtney Institute for Democracy at Penn State University awarded the 2018 Brown Democracy Medal to the Public Mapping Project, an initiative led by Micah Altman, director of research and head of the program on information science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Michael McDonald, associate professor of political science at the University of Florida. The Public Mapping Project disseminates the DistrictBuilder software and data to empower the public to draw legal redistricting plans.