Contributing to Open States

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Open States Summit 2021

Ways to Contribute

• Help Improve Legislator Data
• Write Scrapers
• Contribute to OpenStates.org or API v3
• Help Us Improve Documentation
• Using Data & Promoting Open States
• Enhancement Proposals
• Provide Feedback

General Community Guidelines

Where We Communicate:

• GitHub Discussions
• GitHub Issues
• Slack
• contact@openstates.org

More Information:

https://docs.openstates.org/#communication

Code of Conduct:

http://docs.openstates.org/code-of-conduct/

Contributing to People Data

Source: https://github.com/openstates/people

Uses: YAML

Documentation: https://docs.openstates.org/contributing/people/

• Easy to manually/bulk edit
• Contributions via GitHub PRs
• automatic linting
• os-people tool

People Data Contribution Example

Writing Bill/Vote/Event Scrapers

Source: https://github.com/openstates/openstates-scrapers

Uses: Python 3.9

Files:

• scrapers/{STATE}/bills.py
• scrapers/{STATE}/events.py
• Sometimes scrapers/{STATE}/votes.py

Documentation: https://docs.openstates.org/contributing/scrapers/

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Writing People/Committee Scrapers

Source: https://github.com/openstates/openstates-scrapers

Uses: Python 3.9, Spatula

Directory: scrapers_next

Documentation:

• Spatula: https://jamesturk.github.io/spatula/
• https://docs.openstates.org/contributing/scrapers/

OpenStates.org

https://openstates.org

Source: https://github.com/openstates/openstates.org

Uses: Python 3.9, Django, React (frontend), graphene (GraphQL API)

Ideas:

• Feature events / committees on OS.org
• Improvements to GraphQL API
• Better integration of votes/etc.

API v3

https://v3.openstates.org

Source: https://github.com/openstates/api-v3

Uses: Python 3.9, FastAPI, pydantic, SQLAlchemy

Ideas:

• Additional API parameters
• Expanded helper endpoints
• More examples of usage!

pyopenstates

https://openstates.github.io/pyopenstates/

Source: https://github.com/openstates/pyopenstates

Uses: Python 3

Ideas:

• Just recently ported from API v1 to v3 (thanks Camille Fassett!)
• Parameters & coverage of new API could use some attention
• Bindings in other languages? R? JS?

Documentation

https://github.com/openstates/documentation

Source: https://github.com/openstates/documentation

Uses: Markdown, easy to contribute!

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Using Open States Data

• API Data & Bulk Data
• https://openstates.org/api/
• https://openstates.org/data/
• Tag us on Twitter @openstates
• Talk/Write About it!
• Attribution!

Providing Feedback

GitHub issues: https://github.com/openstates/issues/issues/

Discussions: https://github.com/openstates/issues/discussions

Communication Guide: https://docs.openstates.org/#communication

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Other Ways to Help

• Reach out if you have ideas that could help!
• Share bill links/etc. on social media
• Ask your state for better data
• API or bulk data > scraped data (as long as it is fairly complete!)
• We can help you find the right person to contact
• We have recommendations that we’ve given to other states
• Slip us a piece of paper with an unknown (but public) IP*

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*actually happened

Questions?

https://docs.openstates.org/contributing/

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Up Next: Technical Deep Dive @ 4:30pm

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