openFEC

We are taking data from the Federal Election Commission and creating an API around it. We will be harmonizing/cleaning it up to make it easier for external developers to use and analyze as well as creating a web application to make some analyzation and comparison of the data easier.

Note: This project is still in alpha and not yet deployed. We're still investigating the best ways to present this data to the public.

Outside Contributors

Hello! If you're interested in learning more about this project, check out some related repos and don't be afraid to ask us questions (general questions usually go here: fec).

If you'd like to contribute to our project, please check out our [openfec] (https://github.com/18F/openfec) repo. We try to tag things that are easy to pick up without being entrenched in our project with a "help wanted" tag. Things in our [backlog] (https://github.com/18F/openfec/milestones/Backlog) are usually also up for grabs, so let us know if you'd like to pick something up from there.

For those interested in contributing, please check out our [contributing guidelies] (https://github.com/18F/openfec/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md) we use to guide our development processes internally. You don't have to adhere to them to participate, but following them may help keep things from getting messy.

Our Repos

• fec - A discussion forum where we can discuss the project.
• [openfec] (https://github.com/18F/openfec) - Where our work happens. We create issues related to each sprint and our backlog here. If you're interested in contribution, please look for "help wanted" tags or ask!

Installation

This will work best when installed in to its own Virtual Environment

• $ python setup.py develop
• $ python openfec/entities/pipeline.py CleanData --local-scheduler

This will showcase work so far, which includes combining data from a number of different raw exports from FEC's Data Warehouse (sample files are downloaded) in to a single local database powered by LevelDB for analysis, then beginning the steps of cleaning this data to be a little more sane.

More to come!