Scope

[akilism]

Hi, not exactly sure what you envision the scope of civic.json to be so I'm not 100% sure this is valid feedback.

I think this is a good goal: "In theory, if civic technology groups adopt this standard, it will be possible to aggregate nationwide, regional, or topic-specific lists of civic tech projects."

But my main concern is that it's tied to having your project in a github repo, it seems like if the standard allowed for fields like name, url, organization, description it would be able to support a wider variety of project across any sort of site.

For example say BetaNYC has a hackathon coming up and they need specific types volunteers, a location and sponsors, in addition to that they would like the url to point to the meetup.com page for the event, can this standard represent that project? Is that outside of the scope of what is trying to be accomplished here?

What if my group just decided to use bitbucket instead of github for some reason?

Some of the github data seems more like metadata Forks, Watchers, Issues these may or may not exist depending on the project.

[chriswhong]

By your hackathon example, that's more of an event than a technology project, so github is probably not the best place to be compiling information about it.

The whole point of the api-driven projects page was to keep it from going stale because people dont update the same information in two places. Civic.json is meant to squeeze a bit more functionality out of these api-driven projects pages and still keep the updating distributed/decentralized.

-C On Jan 20, 2014 7:35 PM, "Akil Harris" notifications@github.com wrote:

Hi, not exactly sure what you envision the scope of civic.json to be so I'm not 100% sure this is valid feedback.

I think this is a good goal: "In theory, if civic technology groups adopt this standard, it will be possible to aggregate nationwide, regional, or topic-specific lists of civic tech projects."

But my main concern is that it's tied to having your project in a github repo, it seems like if the standard allowed for fields like name, url, organization, description it would be able to support a wider variety of project across any sort of site.

For example say BetaNYC has a hackathon coming up and they need specific types volunteers, a location and sponsors, in addition to that they would like the url to point to the meetup.com page for the event, can this standard represent that project? Is that outside of the scope of what is trying to be accomplished here?

What if my group just decided to use bitbucket instead of github for some reason?

Some of the github data seems more like metadata Forks, Watchers, Issues these may or may not exist depending on the project.

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHubhttps://github.com/BetaNYC/civic.json/issues/3 .

[evanwolf]

@akilism +1. Brigades like OpenOakland have projects in early stages where they are active but not yet ready to code. Research and Design stages are valid for the purposes of attracting talent, signalling team intent, and publishing your shopping list ("we need 2 front end people and a translator").

So I'd suggest adjusting the spec to support

• projects pages located anywhere (include a link to the canonical civic.json file for this project)
• metadata now extracted/assumed from github.