Hello OpenElectioneers!
One of the first things we did in this project was to collect election metadata in a Django admin (many of you helped with this task at NICAR conferences and other gatherings, and we thank you for it!). As the project has evolved, we've used GitHub as the place for our data, which has left our election metadata process decoupled from our conversion work. In practice, that means it has been easy to ignore and is now out of date. So here's what we're going to do: we'll be converting the metadata into flat files (CSV or JSON, maybe both) and posting it in a new repository on GitHub, and retiring the metadata admin site.
There's also the issue of the metadata API, which is used mostly by the openelections-core repository to build results files. Since that process has been used by only a few volunteers (mostly in Wisconsin and Georgia), we're planning on keeping the API but in a more static form, likely served by GitHub pages.
The overall goal is to standardize our data offerings on a single, simple format - likely the format used in the openelections-data-{state} repositories. For those states that have published data in openelections-results-{state} repositories, we're thinking about converting them into the simpler format in separate repositories so we're not maintaining multiple versions. We won't delete any of the -results- repositories, but we will not add to them going forward.
By 2020, we'd like to get to the point where the data conversion process is simpler and less dependent on external resources. It also will save us a little bit of money each month.
All of this will take a bit to accomplish, and we'd love to hear any comments and reactions to this.
Thanks,
Derek Willis