Slack: #parade-db

contributors:

Data for Democracy is partnering with SocialWorks to build a non-partisan elections data base. SocialWorks created their Parade to the Polls initiative in order to increase engagement in the democratic process in 2016. As the SocialWorks' voting empowerment initiative expands, so does the need to make sure people are informed when they enter the voting booth.

Issues are the cornerstone of American Politics and have recently almost become an afterthought. The failure of current tools to facilitate access to information about the candidates we vote for in elections has left voters in the dark. This database will help make voter education easy by aggregating candidate issues, voting records, past voting results and campaign donations to present in a succinct way. This D4D project will attempt to organize public information in a non-partisan way to make understanding who represents your interests on elections day fun and easy.

This project will attempt to answer questions like:

• Who is running in my area that supports expanding funding for pulblic schools?
• What issues has my district voted for in the past?
• What has my representative voted for while in office?

Before you jump in, check out the D4D contribution tutorial

• All Skill-levels welcome!! We are looking for anyone who wants to get involved, even if you aren't a "data science ninja" or a "data engineering wizard". A lot of this project will be formulating tasks in small, bite sized chunks for other developers. We will also have plenty of tasks for people who are just getting started with data and programming.

• Issues on Issues. No pun intended, we have itemized GitHub issues for pieces of this project that we need help working on from contributors. The tasks will be broken down by type of work required and by skill level. If you're a first time contributor, look for issues that are tagged with beginner-friendly in order to try on getting involved

• Man oh Managing. We are looking for a D4D community leader to help break this project down and make it easier for fellow contributors to work on. This would be a great position for someone who is looking to get some data-science management experience. Responsibilities would be helping translate the project goals into GitHub issues and managing other aspects of the project. Feel free to slack the project leads if that is something you are interested in.