We’re excited to announce that Open States will be holding a code sprint in DC on Sunday, March 19!
When and where?
We’ll kick off in the morning at 9:00 AM, close up around 6:00 PM, and’ll plan to serve both breakfast and lunch. And don’t worry if you can attend for only part o that; we’ll be available to onboard contributors throughout the day.
Development Seed has generously offered to host the event in their office space. The address is 1226 9th St NW, second floor; across from the Convention Center, and two blocks from the Green/Yellow Metro stop at Mt Vernon Square. As Google Maps correctly displays, the main entrance is in the rear of the building (on Blagden Alley), up an exterior staircase. We’ll have signs to guide you!
What’ll we work on?
James, myself, and others will be working hard to enable any and all contributions to the project. We’re especially excited to have new contributors join us!
Our main push for this event will be upgrading existing scraper code from the older Billy framework to the newer Open Civic Data ecosystem. As we’ve discussed before, this conversion will lead to increased performance and structure, as well as a more powerful API and other tools.
With roughly 200 scraper modules to switch over to OCD, it’s a big task! But we’ll have strong documentation and pre-provisioned USB drives to pass around, to help contributors hit the ground running.
What if I don’t live in the DC area?
While we don’t have the capacity to run a virtual event on the day of this DC sprint, we do plan to hold another that’s aimed at developers elsewhere in the country! Additionally, we have an active Slack (sign up!), and a newly-improved quick-start guide, so getting started on tackling Open States bugs is simple!
Finally, James and I are also testing out “office hours” on Google Hangouts once or twice a month, to meet others in the community, answer coding and roadmap questions, and find out how to make Open States volunteering easier and more engaging. Times for those will be posted in advance, but ad-hoc, in our main Slack channel.