Hi again! Checking in with another progress update, as I begin my third and final month staffed full-time on Open States.
We’ve continued to maintain high data quality, as the nation’s legislative sessions move ahead in full-swing; over the past month, we’ve had over 100 code commits to the scraper repository, closing 37 tickets. I’ve been able to take care of most of these bugfixes and manual data corrections, and have also been helping onboard many first-time contributors who are coming to the project via Google Summer of Code.
Speaking of GSoC, James and I will soon be receiving and reviewing first-draft proposals for summer Open States projects. We’ve been having exciting conversations with students on our Slack about their ideas for bill-text analysis, scraper infrastructure enhancements, and crowdsourced data quality tooling. Stay tuned to hear what’s on the summer agenda!
The remaining bulk of my February and March is dedicated to building the all-new version of openstates.org. Working closely with our designer, Olivia Cheng, I’ve begun populating the main pages of the site. And once that’s completed, I’ll enhance the interactivity, such as sortable tables and the find-your-legislator tool.
Our yet-to-be-styled legislator-list webpage
Olivia’s implemented our build system, and integrated a front-end framework that will be at the core of our responsive, mobile-friendly design; here’s a very simple example of this styling at work:
By building a website that responds to screen size, we can replace the aging Open States smartphone apps
I’ll be back to touch base later this month. In the meantime, if you’ve appreciated the data quality and service improvements that full-time staffing has been able to provide, please consider making a donation! My days have only been available to the project because of funding from users like yourself.