Intro to Programming Using Open Government Data
To Do (in rough chronological order):
- Saturday projects
- Go through
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?
- Easily access government data from online database.
- 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?
- How to use python to do basic math/statistics:
- Find minimums, maximums, averages, sums.
- How to get data into appropriate format i.e. from string to integer (if time.)
- How to handle arrays and data objects (if time.)
Good datasets to use.:
Whatever's the most interesting - and maybe something complementary to whatever we use for other projects.
What should the Stats project do?
- Access a file with a cleaned-up dataset.