Summit 2023 Wrap-Up
Thanks for everyone who attended our 2023 Summit, either virtually or in-person in Chicago! I want to provide a quick wrap-up for anyone who missed it.
Watch the talks and tutorials
We recorded our virtual and hybrid sessions so that you can catch up! Check out our Summit playlist on YouTube which includes:
- Introduction to Open States
- How people are using our data, including highlighted users doing academic research, startup innovation, and data integration with a big advocacy organization
- Future of Open States: vision and roadmap
- Developer team question and answer session
- How to write a web scraper tutorial
- How to access and use our data for quantitative analysis tutorial
- Special guest talk on voter turnout and peer-to-peer messaging
Matrix/Element chat space
We debuted a trial run of using Matrix/Element to replace Slack as our chat space. Join us there and provide some feedback!
Participation
We had great turnout for talks. 50+ people joined us for the talks day, which is double from last year’s summit. I really enjoyed the questions and lively engagement with those sessions.
We also had about 15 people participate in our hackathon sessions, producing a number of new pull requests for scrapers! Shout out to you all for making open data happen!
That said, attendance for the hackathon was dramatically lower than our RSVP list. I apologize to anyone who couldn’t get in because the virtual track RSVPs were full. We’re going to re-think a bit before we try another hackathon.
There are still plenty of good first scraper opportunities if you want to watch the tutorial above and get started! Just pick one that hasn’t been assigned to anyone yet, and find us on the chat space with any questions.
Sponsorship
The University of Chicago’s Harris School of Public Policy was very generous in hosting us, providing great space at the Keller Center. We got to meet and work with cool students from their Computational Analysis of Public Policy program. Thanks also to the U Chicago Data Science Institute for co-sponsoring and connecting us with Aaron Schein, who provided the guest talk. Looking forward to more great work in partnership with these folks!