"channels" data, and people search not working?

[Dan Ancona]

Hi there -

I'm building a little app and looking for a list of representative names and twitter handles, and I'd love to be able to tie the app back to an API with more information on the reps. Ideally I'd like something that goes down to the municipal & county levels but I'll take what I can get. I'm happy to come across OCD, looks like exactly the right thing! 

However, I'm not seeing any "channels" (using VIP-speak - i.e. social media channels) fields in the raw data. Maybe I'm looking in the wrong place, but if not, is there a plan for this sort of data to be included? And I can't seem to dig around any records via the API at the moment since people search seems to be not working for me. I tried this:

https://api.opencivicdata.org/people/?name=Obama&apikey=[somethin'] 

And got zero results, although other queries do seem to be functional so at least my key is working.

Thanks!

Dan

[James Turk]

HI Dan-

The short answer is that we haven't collected social media fields for most individuals yet.

When we do they will show up in the links field though, treating them as tagged personal sites instead of "channels."

And as for the Obama issue, his ocd-person id is ocd-person/d4bcb1e7-5956-4432-9111-ab25c9ff3fd7 - using name= requires an exact string match.

Hope this helps.

--

James Turk
Labs Director | Sunlight Foundation
202-558-8723 | @JamesTurk

 

[Dan Ancona]

Very helpful - you're probably aware but the examples on the first page of the API docs don't work, given this. I've got a hoopy solution in mind for my demo app - once I've got something to play with I'll circle back here. But glad this effort is happening, looks like amazing stuff. I'm also working with a new effort called We Vote - http://wevote.info/ - that will definitely be up for interoperating with this. Thanks James!

Dan