Intro to Programming Using Open Government Data

Saturday Projects

Goal: Create open gov projects based off of the Python Workshop Saturday projects.

Three project ideas:

• API project - Paul responsible for first draft of project (by 1/31/2013)
• Stats project - Shauna responsible for first draft of project (by 1/31/2013)
• Graphical - displaying data project

Projects should be:

• as simple as possible
• modular - introduce one thing at a time, possibly in separate scripts labeled "proj1", "proj2" (see the original WordPlay project) for an example.
• well commented (at least for the first draft)

API project

What do we want people to learn?

• What an API is.
• Using the URL bar to query an API vs doing so within a script.
• Endpoints and return values. Get vs put vs post vs delete

Good possible APIs to use:
Capitol Words? Or general Real Time Congress, or Influence Explorer. The key is that whichever API we use should be as simple as possible, with straightforward attribute names.

What should the API do?

• Show how easy it is to access government data online.
• Show examples of querying - how to look for intersects, unions, if-then, etc.
• Maybe link it to a simple display - html page?

Stats project

What do we want people to learn?