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mysociety / yournextrepresentative

A website for crowd-sourcing structured election candidate data
https://candidates.democracyclub.org.uk/
GNU Affero General Public License v3.0
56 stars 21 forks source link

Require sign-up before allowing download of CSV or access to API #872

Open JoeMitchell opened 8 years ago

JoeMitchell commented 8 years ago

Objective: I want to know everybody who's using candidates data. (Because, evaluation / fundraising).

It would be lovely to get: name, organisation, email, and purpose for data (open text field) before letting them download any CSV or access an API.

I don't know the best way to do this, but you might!

We're too late for 2016, probably, but as DC intends to do May 2017 locals, starting as early as possible, it would be good to think about this. And I appreciate this might not be a mySoc thing, it might be just a DC thing, but I had to write it down somewhere.

jf1 commented 8 years ago

Big +1 from me - it's something I was mindful of last year and think should be implemented asap, even if only the csv download can be restricted during these elections.

I expect MySoc has API experts, but if not the cyclestreets developers might be willing to assist.

markbeech commented 8 years ago

I don't see the point of this, I feel it goes against the spirit of the open data and I have to ask, what is the point of people like me investing 100+ hours in collecting this data, in the understanding that it would be published and made available to anyone, if it is then locked away in some inaccessible silo?

tfgg commented 8 years ago

I think if the sign up is lightweight enough it won't be "locked away", and it'd be keeping the same licence. YourNextMP 2010 did this and it didn't seem to pose any issue. Emphasis on lightweight, though, some API sign ups are pretty onerous.

The point is that we should be able to know who is making use of the data, so we can all (especially volunteers contributing lots of their time) be properly credited, and so we know what our impact has been - which is important when we're explaining what Democracy Club has achieved to other people and organisations.

Right now we don't know how many people are using the data, and don't really have a way to find people who aren't properly crediting us (usually unintentionally). On 3 May 2016 14:05, "Mark Beech" notifications@github.com wrote:

I don't see the point of this, I feel it goes against the spirit of the open data and I have to ask, what is the point of people like me investing 100+ hours in collecting this data, in the understanding that it would be published and made available to anyone, if it is then locked away in some inaccessible silo?

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akuckartz commented 8 years ago

:-1:

andylolz commented 8 years ago

👍 for lightweight signup, 👎 for inaccessible silos.

Our most comprehensive list of who used the GE2015 data is #277. It’s much better than nothing, but as an org that’s all about data, we can do better than this! 😄

jf1 commented 8 years ago

Lightweight registration for any API use sounds better than DC running out of funding and/or having an open but unreliable API.

There's a balance between 'locked away' (which wouldn't happen) and 'taken then used for profit without any compensation' - @MarkBeech doesn't want to invest time in the former and I'm not keen on investing too much of my time in the latter.