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codeforamerica / cfapi

The Code for America API. Tracks and motivates activity and participation across the civic technology movement.
http://codeforamerica.org/api
MIT License
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usage notes on the projects 'categories' object #144

Open rebeccawilliams opened 9 years ago

rebeccawilliams commented 9 years ago

I am not sure exactly how this should be handled, but it seems like referencing a pre-determined 'categories' list in the projects properties documentation would be helpful. Perhaps the ISO 37120:2014(en) categories (Economy, Education, Energy, Environment, Finance, Fire and emergency response, Governance, Health, Recreation, Safety, Shelter, Solid waste, Telecommunications and innovation, Transportation, Urban planning, Wastewater, Water and sanitation) or something else?

Otherwise folks working on similar projects might not be able to find them due to different subjective input, e.g. two different Affordable Housing projects, but one lists Real Estate and the other lists Fair Housing as 'categories'.

Confusion might happen anyway, but some usage notes with a reference could help keep things consistent.

pmackay commented 9 years ago

Agree a standard set of terms very useful. Ideally in the enhanced version (https://github.com/codeforamerica/cfapi/milestones/Enhancements) it would be link to a linked data definition.

ondrae commented 9 years ago

Hi @rebeccawilliams . Great idea.

I think the way we'll get people to use these categories is when we build out an easy way for people to add individual projects to be included in #59. We can have a drop down with these suggested categories or people can type in their own. Your list is pretty comprehensive though, so it may cover everything.

It will involve lots of hand holding either way as the majority of projects are pulled from GitHub. We'll need to do something like a civic.json file to give categories to all of those projects.