project suggestion: General Billy

[Steven Collins]

(Yesterday I submitted a post, as a new member, which was fairly rambling and clueless. Mods, probably no need to forward that on unless you want to. After looking at things for another day I am ever so slightly less clueless.)

I have come up with a (surely not wholly original idea) for a project I propose to call General Billy. The idea came from a proposal to extend Open State to cities. Being a mathematician by training who loves to generalize, I thought, why stop there? The idea I have is to develop and/or implement a generalization of billy that would allow scraping and sharing of data for a great many sorts of legislation and legislation-like scenarios. Cities, counties, the United Nations, other countries, your underwater basketweaving enthusiast's club, server cluster master elections - anything where a group of individuals are creating and finalizing rules or proclamations, and the decisions made and actions taken by the individuals involved during this process are published in some sense.

The idea here, partially, is code reuse and modularity - for example, if you were the first person to implement in this system, say, a scraper for a (particular) city with a mayor-council government structure, you might have a lot of work to do. But if you followed certain guidelines for building the pieces to get up to that in a modular way, the next person who wanted to write a scraper for another city with the same government structure would have very little work to do.

Again, I'm sure this idea is not wholly original and I am mostly ignorant of the history of any ideas to generalize billy. And so far all this project is is an idea, a fork of billy with an updated README, and a one-page wiki. But hopefully it's enough to start a conversation.

See

https://github.com/code12atx/general-billy

Thank you,
Steven Collins

[James Turk]

Hi Steven,

Thanks for this post, and let me try and fill in a bit of background.

Billy was spun out of Open States with the hope of being exactly what you describe, but an approach hasn't been decided upon yet.  There is some rudimentary support in there (look for the field 'level') but I'm not sure we're going to stick with it the way it is.

I'd be very interested to hear your thoughts on how it can best be generalized and getting those changes back into mainline billy, the main condition being that we can't break openstates, though I'm fine deprecating things in favor of a better way if need be.

-James

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Open State Project" group.
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msg/fifty-state-project/-/GyiKY1ZpWoIJ.
To post to this group, send email to fifty-sta...@googlegroups.com.
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to fifty-state-pro...@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/fifty-state-project?hl=en.