Contributors

We want your help! Right now, the things we could use the most are research and data validation. We've put together a scraping infrastructure that sources both global and country-specific data, pulling it together into standardized data structures that facilitate international comparison.

We welcome both technical and non-technical contributors. No matter what your background is we'd love to have you join us in our efforts to make governmental and societal data more transparent. We have no funding as of right now and therefore cannot pay contributors (yet) but your contributions will be made free the public and among the first in this community.

Non Technical Contributors

Right off the bat, you could start by reaching out to us with answers to these prompts...

• Tell us about yourself and how you're using the tool.
• Do you consider yourself an educator or journalist?
• What do you find useful? Painful? Missing? Submit an idea!

We'd also love for you to become a more regular contributor. You don't need an engineering background for this but we do ask that you create a GitHub account here or -- if you want to feel like a hacker -- over here. Once you have one, join us in our intake repo and help shape new ideas, flesh out existing ones, and find the right datasets and features to integrate next.

Technical Contributors

If you have a background in software engineering or at least some experience writing code, we'd love to have you contribute. Whether it's enriching existing data or introducing new datasets, we'll find a way to cater to your interests.

Our main focus right now is broadening our international data and "Explore" visualizations. See these ideas as an example of what we have in mind and feel free to join the conversation. We'd also like to deepen our political data through stable sources.

We're also considering having a group dive deeper into our US dataset. We've found that, at least for data around politicians, there's a lot of open source knowledge we can help pull together to help people form a more complete picture of their representatives. Like the "Voting History" feature we recently added to our politician pages, we intend to generalize the implementation so it could used for any country where the data is available.

If any of this sounds interesting just give us a heads up before you start on it to avoid overlapping with someone else's work.