Introduce yourself!

[welschp]

Welcome to the repo for the National Day of Civic Hacking at the White House! We're pulling together a great team for this event, including folks who'll join us here at the White House on June 1 and others who'll be taking part remotely all through the month of May.

I thought I'd open a thread so everyone can introduce themselves and describe the kind of projects they're interested in working on. I'll go first.

My name's Pete Welsch, I'm Deputy Director of Online Platform in the White House Office of Digital Strategy. I work with the teams of developers behind We the People and WhiteHouse.gov. If you have any questions or concerns about the hackathon or the We the People API, please don't hesitate to reach out.

Who's next?

[dlapiduz]

Hi there, I am Diego Lapiduz (@dlapiduz) from Boca Raton, FL. I work with @cndreisbach at the CFPB and I am really looking forward to meeting you all.

Regarding to what I am planning to build, I am thinking of building an web app where you can see petitions in relation to what your congressman is working on. I know this is not apples to apples but it would be interesting to allow people to communicate to congress what they are supporting or petitioning in We The People.

[colmdoyle]

Hey All,

I'm Colm Doyle, a Software Engineer at Facebook who works on our efforts around Non-Profits and Government. I'll be at the hackathon in person to help out if you plan to integrate any element of Facebook Platform into your projects.

If you're hacking remotely, I'll also be able to take questions on the day too, probably through an issue here on the repo.

Looking forward to seeing what everyone comes up with!

Colm http://fb.me/colmdoyle http://twitter.com/colmisainmdom

[yoni]

Hello, I am Yoni Ben-Meshulam, a Data Scientist with Opower. I participated in the first hackathon and will be attending on June 1, as well. I'll also take a little credit for roping @heyitsgarrett into joining us this time. :)

For the last hackathon, I wrote the r_we_the_people R package. I'm not sure what I'll be working on this time, but it will likely fall into one of these buckets:

1. Extract interesting features (e.g. entities, locations, sentiment, writing style) from the petition text and make them available via REST endpoints. This might be done at the individual petition level or across issues. I'll probably use one or more of these APIs to do the heavy lifting: AlchemyAPI, Open Calais, uClassify, Semantria
2. Create a predictive model for which petitions will get signatures (my stretch goal from last time)
3. Serve up visual assets of individual petitions and issues for other apps to use. Similar to what I did with the r_we_the_people package examples

I am comfortable across the stack, including Java, Ruby, Python, R, and JavaScript.

I love all of the great ideas flowing here!! Looking forward to meeting y'all.

Best, Yoni @spaceborne

[mnloff]

Hi folks!

I'm Matt Loff @mnloff, and I'm the co-owner of Visionist, Inc. - a small Maryland-based Dept. of Defense consulting firm. We specialize in data analytics, signal processing, and visualization.

I threw together "We the Politics" for the lack hackathon, and had a blast doing so.

Yoni and I are talking over ways of collaborating this time around, and I plan on reusing a lot of my code from the first go-round. As soon as I incorporate a few bugfixes into the API client, I'll be pushing the whole source repo to Github as well.

For June 1, my goal is to build more of a koisk-type web application -- one that relies on a semi-intelligent backend service to pull new petitions & signatures from the white house on a recurring basis, then buffer + stream them out to clients, making the experience feel more like a live Twitter stream or chatroom, as opposed to a collection of queryable pages.

Looking forward to meeting you all soon!

Cheers, Matt

[typesend]

Greetings, my fellow hackers! (And a special shout out to @ivanstegic, as we are both traveling from Minnesota.)

Technologies I like using lately include: Ruby on Rails, Go, Riak, and Postgres. Currently my day job includes developing an internal tool for Symantec, but they were kind enough to let me work remotely for several days surrounding this event. I plan to be exploring the D.C. area thru Wednesday, in a mediocre attempt to make the most of my trip. Partners in crime are welcome!

This is my first real hackathon evar although I've spent the last three years social hacking in the Duluth, MN area in an effort to get Google to bring their FTTH project there, and also to attract large data center projects to the region.

I can't seem to decide what I would like to build; there's a good chance I'll throw in with some of you to help you realize and promote your projects.

Looking forward,

Ben Damman

[yoni]

I've created a new API for extracting entities, locations, sentiment and more from petition data. I hope that other folks can use this API to augment their apps with rich data from the petition text.

This is currently in rough form, so I'm eager to get people's feedback, ideas, pull requests and usage examples. I'll continue working on it this weekend, so please expect the API to change A LOT.

The live app and an example call to the API:

http://wetheentities.herokuapp.com/ http://wetheentities.herokuapp.com/petitions/51942b9b2f2c888e2f00000c.json

The codebase and issues:

https://github.com/yoni/wetheentities https://github.com/yoni/wetheentities/issues

I also opened issue #9 for any discussion and details.

Best, @yoni

[theneonlobster]

Hello. My name is David Platek and I am on the team that built the API. The day of the Hackathon I will be available to answer questions and take comments, and I will also be working on the API itself.

[sinak]

Hey folks, I'm Sina (twitter: sinak). I started the We the People petition on unlocking cell phones and am now advocating for a fix at FixtheDMCA.

I'm best at frontend code and design. Happy to help out with anyone's projects who might need it; feel free to ping me on twitter or email (sina dot khanifar at gmail).

[sinak]

Okay, here's a project suggestion:

Idea: A site that allows senator/representatives to see how many of their constituents signed a particular petition.

Why: Often petitions on the WtP site require Congressional action. But convincing legislators to take action is difficult, and they generally only care about the opinions of their own constituents, and not the general public. Showing legislators how many of their constituents signed up to a particular petition can have a pretty significant impact on swaying them to taking action.

Building it: This could either be done with a server backend, or just via client-side js (similar to the Petition Mapper project). Combining the WtP API with the Sunlight Congress API should be very doable.

Would love some help in making it happen - feel free to tweet or email me.

This is rather self-serving, as I'm spending the days after the hackathon meeting with staffers in DC to try and convince them that Congress needs to pass a bill to legalize cell phone unlocking. I'd love to have reports that I can print out for each meeting and hand out to them, and I imagine it'd be really useful for other advocates following up on WtP petitions too.

[jmandzik]

Hey Sina!

Lot's of overlap between your suggestion and what I'm currently working on. Would love to join forces and take over the world collaborate. I'm currently working on a few different ways to crunch the zip codes down into sizeable chunks and then query census data. Hit me up!

[dlapiduz]

@sinak @jmandzik I am working on something similar too, also using the Sunlight API. We should chat and maybe combine our efforts!

[jessebeach]

@sinak, maybe we can turn #3 into a Dashboard for Congresspeople. Having a specific audience will help us define the feature set more narrowly.

[sinak]

@jessebeach Really like that idea. @dlapiduz would love to chat, want to ping me on gchat? i'm sina.khanifar@gmail.com. Combining forces is definitely a win :).

[entaq]

Hi all - I am Arun Nagarajan from Google. I work in the NYC office on Google Apps Script. My goal is to build generalized data analysis tools to help journalists and citizens tell better stories from raw data. The product I work on is http://developers.google.com/apps-script. Ideas welcome :)

[yahelc]

Hi all, I'm Yahel Carmon, and I'm an analytics developer at Blue State Digital. @douglasback and I are working on a petition dashboard/analytics project. If you're interested in contributing, come find us. (There seem to be a couple of different approaches bubbling through, though, and that's exciting!)

[waldoj]

Folks, at the suggestion of some folks in charge here, I've set up an organizational GitHub repository for us all to use, should anybody care to.

[ryanatwork]

Hi I'm Ryan I'm a Senior Engineer at Upworthy. Former Obama for America engineer, former Technical Lead at Code for America.

[jessebeach]

Upload your photos!

https://plus.google.com/u/0/events/cqm96ov762215hto2n0f67fim9o

[ivanstegic]

Such a wonderful time, thanks everyone!

@waldoj thanks for setting up the organization -- are you suggesting we move all repos from yesterday to be under the org? I think it'd be a good way to aggregate them all...

[yahelc]

@waldoj if the answer to @ivanstegic's question is yes, I think organization participants need elevated permissions -- it looks like "Participant" isn't high enough to permit forking into the organization.

[waldoj]

@ivanstegic Sure, that seemed like a perfectly reasonable possibility. Seems like it'd be good to put them all in one place, or at least copies of them. Thank you, @yahelc—I thought that the permissions were high enough, but apparently administrative privileges are required, which I've just provided. Hopefully nobody now accidentally deletes the organization. :)