Google Summer of Code — Crowdsourcing & Scraper Fixing

Hello everyone!

My name is Bikram Bharti, I am working with Open States this summer aspart of the Google Summer of Code program.

About Me

I am a junior year student with major in Electronics Engineering at IIT (Varanasi) BHU. I started my journey with open source contributions in 2016, with contributions in few of the web-development related projects of fossasia.

I started contributing to Open States last spring, helped convert many states from billy to pupa, wrote documentation for event conversion and fixed a few scrapers. This year I wrote new vote scrapers for few states, and helped fix several scrapers.

About the Project

At Open States, we need new data quality tools to accept & curate data edits from community. Right now the dashboard is only viewable by project administrators, we want to accommodate the edits made by the community and keep track of the changes and facilitate roll backs to any edit level. Moreover, we aim to keep the scrapers in good shape too, so I am setting aside time for scraper fixing.

Rough Timeline

  1. In the first month, I aim to complete the skeleton of back end part of editing system (no UI), like creating edits, and applying them to database.

  2. In the second month, I’ll aim for minimum viable product allowing users to create edits and admin to accept/reject those edits.

  3. Finally, I’ll work to apply these changes to the database & work on leftover tests and documentations.

And of course, apart from these points, we have decided to give substantial time for scraper fixing too through out the summer.