Turbot week one

[Seb Bacon]

Hi all,

Thanks for joining the mailing list. I thought I'd write a few words about what's been going on this week, by way of an introduction as much as anything.

I'm the Product Lead for OpenCorporates, incidentally... if you feel like introducing yourself, please do :)

So, this week, we quietly launched the Turbot platform. We're not ready to shout about it yet, until we've smoothed some of the rough edges off. The good news is that feedback has been pretty good on the whole, so while we've still got a long way to go, I think we've managed to get something right (though sorry to those of you who have been blocked by bugs - we're working on them!)

This week, in terms of code and/or data:

• Friedrich added Ethopian financial licences (1, 2);
  
• Páll added Icelandic financial licences;
  
• Shyam added Polish state-owned banks;
• Silvio added the San Marino corporate register; and
• Andy valiantly persisted at trying to add German Patents (he's hit a very strange bug we can't reproduce)

We also had really useful feedback from all the above plus quite a few others who haven't got round to contributing data yet - it's been brilliant to start getting feedback from people on this.

I'm on holiday next week so we'll be in bug-fixing and maintenance mode. Then when I get back we'll be looking at adding polish, and cleaning up a few bugs. Importantly, we'll be adding two important features:

1. support storing state with your bot (e.g. so you can resume an interrupted scrape) 
2. supplying transformers with your bot. This will allow you to submit raw data, and at the same time specify how it should be transformed into a format supported by OpenCorporates. This means, for example, that the financial licence bots referred to above, and the San Marino companies, can all end up in the main OpenCorporates website (which means they can be cross-referenced with other facts about those companies)

In about two weeks time we're going to launch a campaign to get as many new records imported as possible, in as few days as possible. This will help focus us on the most important features and bug fixes. In terms of a target, we're still thinking about it, but we'll go for something ridiculously ambitious... ideas welcome!

Have a good weekend. I'm hoping for the English weather to be kind of me on the beach next week; I'll do another update in 2 weeks.

Seb