May I claim North Dakota?

[bouvard]

Good afternoon everyone,

I have recently dispensed with a few long term projects and am
looking for something positive to do with a slice of my time. In
addition I am a huge fan of the work of Sunlight Labs and have long
wanted to get involved. I have taken a look at the list of states
that haven't had scrapers written yet and it seems that the majority
of them simply do not expose the sort of data that the project is
looking for. (Nebraska for example, only has data for the current
year and will undoubtedly only have data for next year after the
calendar turns over.) However, North Dakota does seem to expose a
significant amount of data in a manner that is amenable to scraping,
so I would be willing to tackle it, if no one else has claim. I'm not
sure if there is any question of qualifications, but I have written
significant Python code, including scrapers. (I have also worked with
Django, which SL Labs seems to have an appropriate fondness for.) You
can see the one major open source project I have worked on here:
http://www.etlafins.com. (The NoStaples tab, specifically.)

On a broader note, I would also be interested in following any other
SL Labs projects and finding out if there are other ways that I might
get involved. I have pretty much experienced the gamut technically
and I think I might be able to provide some value with the time that I
can provide. I also have a number of ideas of my own, but I won't
assert those on anyone until I have shown that I can contribute
something meaningful. :-)

Thanks,
Christopher Groskopf
(onyxfish on Twitter, bouvard everywhere else)

[bouvard]

Since I did not hear back from anyone regarding this today (and I felt
motivated) I went ahead and began work on it. So far scraping of the
legislators is implemented for the period covering 1999 to 2009. I'll
take a first crack at the bills sometime tomorrow.

I also took the liberty of updating the project wiki. Hopefully that
is not stepping on anyone's toes. :-/

My fork is here: http://github.com/bouvard/fiftystates/tree/master

Cheers,
Chris

[Rebecca Shapiro]

Help yourself with North Dakota or any other state that hasn't been claimed yet  Please email the list if you have any questions.

-Rebecca