Best place for documentation?

[Eleanor Tutt]

Hello -

I've been working on an API & visualization tool with some friends for our local Board of Alderman vote data and I recently learned about the Open Civic Data API & data standard. Definitely interested in using/contributing to a standard rather than doing our own thing - I believe in standards. :)

I'm concerned about the standard documentation, though - there are notes that read "Parts of Open Civic Data underwent a large refactor as of mid-2014, some information on this page may be out of date."

Being new to the project, I'm not sure how to figure out what is accurate documentation and what isn't - if there is code or some other place I should be looking at to double-check docs, could someone point me in the right direction?

Thanks!

Eleanor

[Patrick Connolly]

I don't have much info (I'm new as well), but just so as not to leave you hanging:

I've been told that the context is that the OCD project has been de-prioritized by Sunlight Labs, due to scarce resources -- Perhaps that was added around that time. Having said that, there are definitely people outside the org still working on it (some who were previously working at Sunlight Labs). They're likely a bit strapped, and so documentation unfortunately gets out-of-date.

Having said that, my impression as a fellow investigator is that the standard is still alive and well (with lots of folks actively contributing) and the scrapers and tools on github (and the data itself, when scraped locally) work great. It's just the hosted API and docs themselves that perhaps haven't be afforded as much love lately.

[Forest Gregg]

Hi all,

DataMade has taken over the hosting of municipal data. http://ocd.datamade.us/jurisdictions/

Right now that's just Chicago, New York City, Miami Dade, Ferguson MO, and St Louis, MO.

Documentation is really pretty bad right now. But here's the plan for the scrapers:

1. DataMade will update our scrapers to use pupa 0.5.2

2. We'll start writing the scraper docs, which will be deployed to http://docs.opencivicdata.org/en/latest/scrape/index.html

If someone else can take up updating the docs for the API that'd be great.

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773.888.2718

[Eleanor Tutt]

Thank you both so much for your assistance!

I'm a little unclear on how to update API documentation - I am generally a *user* of documentation - but I'm open to pitching in. 

Eleanor

[Forest Gregg]

Hi Eleanor,

The API exposes a subset of Django's QuerySet API reference. https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.8/ref/models/querysets/

It wouldn't be too bad to just start by noting that, and identifying what parts of the queryset are available.

Best,

Forest

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773.888.2718

[Patrick Connolly]

Thanks for the context Forest! I'm sure others are well aware, but just in case I was the only one who didn't realize: James is hosting Canadian scraper data at:
https://scrapers.herokuapp.com/jurisdictions/

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