Open Civic Data Thanksgiving push

[Paul Tagliamonte]

Hey Labs!

Some of you may have caught murmurings of the Open Civic Data
project[1], or seen some of our work on the GitHub org[2] as we've
been working on it for the past year or so.

We're currently pushing for some data collection over Thanksgiving
(http://sunlightfoundation.com/blog/2014/11/24/help-liberate-your-towns-info-with-the-open-civic-data-project/)
to start to iron out the final bugs in the infrastructure and start to
battle-test some of the parts.

I encourage folks to play with some of the data in our API[3] (which
contains state and municipal level information), and test out our
Python wrapper[4], and even do some manual collection of data (it's
fun, really!) and send it up.

This features a lot of work spent creating tools and infrastructure in
the style of Open States' work, but with current technology (Python 3,
PostgreSQL), and made generic enough to use for most legislative
bodies.

A lot of the push will be with manual data collection (and tools to
enable that) rather then a scraper push, due to the sheer volume of
municipalities we're collecting data for.

I also encourage you to point interested friends and family to the
project, the spreadsheet upload system is designed for
non-programmers, so feedback from less technical users would be
wonderful!

Exciting times! Please send any feedback you have to me, or the
openci...@sunlightfoundation.com email alias

Happy Thanksgiving!
Paul


[1]: http://opencivicdata.org/
[2]: https://github.com/opencivicdata/
[3]: http://api.opencivicdata.org/
[4]: https://github.com/opencivicdata/python-opencivicdata-api


--
Paul Tagliamonte
Software Developer | Sunlight Foundation

[J. Albert Bowden]

paul,

getting 502 error when submitting data...
sorry for posting this here, but wasn't sure where to post this....i'm not aware of where/if the uploader is on github to create an issue.

looks good though. can't wait to help out, see the results!
cheers,
albert