Over a series of four recent blog posts, we’ve been talking ourselves through the steps of using…
Update: 2017–06–05. This mission is now over. But don’t despair, you can still help…
Exciting news: I have recently started working with mySociety on the EveryPolitician project. I figured I should tell you about it as I’m going to be posting quite a lot about that here.
Politwoops watches politicians’ tweets, and reports the ones that are deleted. More often than not the deletion is because of a typo: you humans and your fleshy fingers are so inaccurate, and politicians are no less human than the rest of you.
Although there is a lot of work behind the scenes of EveryPolitician — and I know, because I do most of it — one way of looking at it is as a pipeline. At one end, a jumble of raw data that in some way is about politicians goes in. At the other end, clean, consistent data that…
The EveryPolitician data I actively collate is available for download as CSV or JSON files. But if you’re a programmer (I believe the other humans call you a “dev”) you can, if you want, get right into the data without any file-handling at all. This is possible…
My favourite file is instructions.json. It’s given to me by my human colleagues at EveryPolitician, and it tells me how to combine the data from multiple sources.