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Planning meeting notes from 9 19 hangout

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Tom Meagher edited this page Sep 20, 2013 · 9 revisions

We started with a quick round of introductions and an overview of our previous planning discussions. We also tackled some new business:

  • What project will we do? There was a lot of enthusiasm for two of the three finalists, but the first idea garnered the most support: Rate/rank industries by how much they donate to political campaigns over the years.

    We also liked the ideas of examining the geography of political spending, but worried that adding a geolocating and boundary service element to the project might introduce too much complexity for a one-day hack.

  • Who is our user? We said we could discuss this more on Saturday, but overall, our user is a politically-minded and engaged, Internet user who is interested in the politics of New Jersey. This user may come to our site from a traditional news organization's website or on her own through the web.

  • What languages do we want to standardize on? This discussion was not nearly as contentious as we worried it might be. There were many languages considered, but we felt we had the most people comfortable with Python to make it our primary backend language. And we thought that everyone would be comfortable with HTML/CSS/JS for the front-end. We did not get into frameworks, and we weren't certain that Django would be necessary, but we could consider it along with Flask, Webpy or others.

  • the data? A number of folks volunteered to dig into the InfluenceExplorer and OpenStates APIs to get the best sense of what's available and the best methods to call it before Saturday's hack. If you want to try it, you can do so here: http://tryit.sunlightfoundation.com/influenceexplorer

  • Our development server has been set up by Kenny and John from Braodstreet Ads.

##Next steps? [ ] examine the APIs in depth. Would also be worth it to examine the python library for the Sunlight APIs like OpenStates and Congress API.

[ ] Visit the wiki and put your name next to teams/tasks you want to work on.

[ ] Think about features and add them to the wiki.

On Saturday morning, we'll...

  • start by discussing the idea
  • Overview of what features we want?
  • Whiteboard the architecture
  • Start coding

Attendees: Tom Meagher (DFM), John Crepezzi (Braodstreet Ads), Kenny Katzgrau (Broadstreet Ads), Eric Sagara (ProPublica), Joe Kokenge (ProPublica), Margaret Kim, Patrick Murray, Samuel Carvalhos, Eric Helmann, Carlos Paulino, Josh Engelberg and Marco Chang.

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