October PHXdata summary
Mark Ng
PHXdata projects are at at the moment. Present were Brian Shaler,
David Gleason, Aaron Kavlie, Nick Martin, Andrew Long, Mike Benner,
myself. Thanks to everyone who attended.
Recast:
Brian has been waiting for several months for me to do some backend
work on Recast, which I haven't had the time to do. After hearing a
summary of what Recast will do, Mike expressed an interest on working
on the backend with Brian, and they both mentioned the idea of using
node.js to run the backend (node.js will work well for this for us,
because recast doesn't use any of Django's advantages particularly and
Javascript is more universal amongst coders available to work on
PHXData projects). We all agreed this was a great idea. The code will
live in the github repository, where the current start on a django
project is ( https://github.com/phxdata/recast ).
TheyWorkForAZ:
Some months ago, great progress was made toward making TheyWorkForAZ
fully functional, with the help of my time and the time of Cronkite
School journalism students (among others, Heather Billings, a member
of this list) donated by the school. Currently, a prototype of the
application with old data is online at http://theyworkforaz.us/ - it
needs the following done in order to make it a complete product :
Link it up with Sunlight Labs Openstates API product, in order that we
don't need to maintain a scraper, and to make it possible for other
states to use our code for similar ideas
Finish the tracking functionality - at the moment, you can mark
entities (Bills, Represenatives, Senators etc) for tracking, but don't
get emails when these things change.
Improve the geocoding process to increase accuracy around the borders
of districts - at the moment, we warn people when our results might be
inaccurate - this might be okay.
If no-one gets to this before me, I'll have significant time to work
on this in December, or at our next hackathon.
PHXData website:
The PHXdata website is up on github (
https://github.com/phxdata/PHXdata-Website ). Anyone can fork and make
changes which we can pull. If you've made a change that needs to go
onto the site, then fire an email to Brian Shaler, who donates the
server space that it runs on.
Data Catalog:
Aaron explained to us a little bit more about how the Data Catalog
works - some of us (myself included) had the misconception that it was
a place to upload datasets to, when it's actually a place to show
people where datasets are. If you'd like to add datasets to the
catalog, the best way to do so is to register for an account (
http://catalog.phxdata.org ), and then ask Aaron or someone else with
admin access (soon, me) to set your account to admin access. There's
still a bunch of things to clean up- this project also lives in the
PHXData github repository. Myself and Aaron have access to the server
instance that Andrew Long donated for this project and the boundary
service project, and if you make changes, either of us can pull them
onto the server.
Boundary Service:
We didn't discuss the boundary service much yesterday, but it's live
with data in it. However, currently, there is no front end added to
the application. Christopher Groskopf (of the Panda Project), one of
the developers who wrote the service, has some front end code that I
believe we could borrow.
There were several other interesting unrelated discussions, including,
but not limited to :
Techniques and tools AuthorityLabs use in order to deal with large
scale SEO-related datasets, how frustrating it is that speed ticket
payment hasn't entered the 21st century, Malcolm Gladwell and
Spaghetti Sauce, how deep into the wilderness cell service goes and
why we're all not sure that moving to SF is really a great idea.
Next months meeting is the same time (First Tuesday, 6:30pm) venue is
to be decided.
We're wanting to organise a hackathon within the next few months. I've
suggested a date on the list already, but I'm open to suggestions.
Please add anything important I neglected to include.
Mark
Mark
Nick Martin
Great update, Mark. And great meeting last night, everyone. It renewed my excitement in the projects we're working on at PHXdata. Thanks to everyone who came out and made it possible. I'm looking forward to November's meeting and seeing what happens in the meantime.
Nick Martin
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Aaron
discussions last night.
I've granted you and several others superuser rights for Phoenix Data
Catalog, and it appears that this is the place to submit resources:
http://catalog.phxdata.org/_admin_/opendata/resource/
As mentioned last night, the form can be used by less adventurous
users to submit info about data sources. But that just generates an
email... a superuser still manually needs to input that data into the
admin, as the app stands now.
As the data catalog mostly needs non-programmer love right now (design
& data submissions), I may be able to spare a bit for TheyWorkforAZ &
Recast in the coming months. You think the Openstates integration
might be a good place to start, or something else?