OpenGovernment Developer Volunteer.

[annerajb]

Hello,
My name is Anner and I am from Puerto Rico. I helped the openstates
project parse the Puerto Rico senate and house data. Currently I would
like to help OpenGovernment in accomplish the required development
task to support Puerto Rico. I am aware that some apis do not work for
PR specifically votesmart and Follow The Money So i would like to
volunteer to help opengovernment solve any issues with the openstates
data from PR.
And get in contact with the API providers to help them get Puerto Rico
to work. Be so by providing the data they need or coding.

What do I need to get started on helping the OpenGovernment effort?

[David Moore :: OpenGovernment]

Hi Anner, thanks for getting in touch. I'm Product Manager of OpenGovernment, glad you're volunteering for P.R.

Big picture: our non-profit PPF is currently fundraising for further development of the site and rolling out to more U.S. states & cities in 2012. Our initial development grant from our partners the Sunlight Foundation ran out in summer 2011, and we had an amicable separation with Carl Tashian, PPF's former Director of Technology and the programmer who assembled the terrific open-source technology behind OpenGovernment. We aim to hire another lead programmer for OG as early as possible next year and to build-up our open-source volunteer community... we'd love for this to be a thriving, remixable project for user-friendly transparency at all levels of government.

If you're reading this and can offer contacts with charitable foundations or other potential funding partners for OG, please help us grow -- feel free to circulate our not-for-profit, open-source / open-data / open-gov / open standards funding prospectus. We're very excited to reach more states & cities, test a slew of planned user interface tweaks, and highlight more money-in-politics data (e.g. please see our wish-list from this beta version). We have some good funding leads and most importantly, a great piece of software (GovKit) and web app (OG) and community (on OC & OG & #opengov generally) upon which to build.

Anner, from our developers hub, you can get started w/ the existing README doc, Contributors' guide, wiki installation instructions, and more. If you're a programmer who can volunteer to help PPF coordinate contributions to our GitHub account, please get in touch with me, david @ ppoltitics dot org. For now, more detailed technical assistance beyond those GitHub instructions will need to come, for now, from other Rails programmers among the 71 members on this development list.

In positive news, last week I published a blog post for the VoxPopuLII research blog on the goals of OG, the GovKit software that powers it, and some of our metrics so far this year:

... with limited outreach and no paid advertising or commercial partnerships, OpenGovernmentbeta with its six states will have received over half a million pageviews in its first year of existence. As withOpenCongress, by far the most-viewed content as of now is bills, found via search engines by their official number, which send approximately two-thirds of all traffic (and of that, Google alone sends over half). Hot bills in Texas and the WI organizing bill constitute three of OG’s top ten most-viewed pages sitewide. After hearing about a firearms bill in the news or from a neighbor, for example, users type “texas bill 321″ or “sb 321″ into Google and end up on OG, where they’re able to skim the bill’s news coverage, view the campaign contributions (for example) and interest group ratings (for example) of its authors and sponsors, and notify their legislators of their opinions by finding and writing their elected officials. (More context on OC blog.)

... if anyone reading this is interested in volunteering to help me maintain OG's GitHub account, Carl has generously offered to make his time available to facilitate a smooth transition. I'll stay in touch next year as we put out a job announcement for a new OG lead programmer -- hopefully some members of this mailing list may be interested in applying -- and we'll continue to fundraise from state & local foundations to give us resources to bring in more data from Open States and other data sources, and put out more of our user-generated info on our open API (in development).

... Anner, drop me a line anytime and we'll chat over any questions you encounter, my full contact info is below, happy to help support work on P.R. as best I can.

More to come,
-David

da...@ppolitics.org
m: (917) 753-3462
AIM / Jabber / Skype :: davidmooreppf
http://twitter.com/ppolitics

[John Lockwood]

Hi David,

I sent you an email.  If you're still looking for help on Github, let me know.  https://github.com/JohnLockwood, or Twitter @JohnLockwood, or see the email.

Cheers,

John

[Endy Pwrt]