To add a little extra excitement to #election-transparency's corner of the D4D Hackathon this weekend, your leads team has put together a little friendly competition!
Our goal is to stimulate the best and most creative contributions from the 250+ folks in he channel, and have even more fun building out our project's goodness. To that end...here's the deal.
- By the end of the Hackathon (2 pm EDT / 11 am PDT) on Sunday, post a message to #election-transparency on Slack to submit your contribution
- Your contribution should be in the form of a GitHub pull request that adds content to the
notebooksdirectory in the repo - Your contribution will ideally be in the form of an iPython or R (Rmd) notebook, but we're open to other formats too, as long as they are accessible via freely-available tools
- Please identify your contribution as being in one of these three categories:
- State-focused: Tell a short story that gives new and/or surprising insight about the electorate, politics, or elections in a US state
- Result-focused: Tell a short story that conveys a nugget of insight or a finding about the 2016 US Presidential election that has not yet been widely reported
- Future-focused: Present a compelling idea for a new project or topic for the election-transparency effort to undertake, and justify both the impact/value and feasibility of the project, making reference to data sources that we'd use to undertake it
- Bonus consideration will be given to contributions that enhance (or propose to enhance) the existing election-transparency datasets with new data
- The ideal submission will be accessible to a wide audience. Feel free to break out those support vector machine algorithms or a multinomial probit with assymetric truncation--but in the end, your goal is to tell a story whose main idea is easily comprehensible. Concise submissions with visualizations and strong, clear writing will likely come out on top. (And after all, you have less than a weekend to complete this, so you can only cover so much!)
- Most of all: learn, have fun, and make a contribution to this important initiative
Your esteemed panel of judges will be:
- The three #election-transparency leads
- Jonathon Morgan (@jonathon)
- Three elections SMEs from #election-transparency: Daniel Scarvalone (@dscarvalone), Mark Stephenson (@redoakmark), and Andrew Therriault (@therriault)
The judges panel will select up to three finalist contributions, and submit the finalists to a popular vote of the #election-transparency channel members. Yes, the final winner selection will happen via a transparent election. We wouldn't have it any other way. :)
Judges may submit contributions "just for fun" but will not be eligible to win.
The judges will meet after the Hackathon ends to choose the finalists, with a poll on the channel to follow sometime next week.
At a minimum, the leads will post a document to the election-transparency GitHub repo highlighting the winner's and finalists' submissions with links to their original submitted notebooks. We are also planning to work with the D4D storytelling team to publish the finalists' submissions in a d4d blog post.
In short: you'll achieve public fame and notoriety for your election data awesomeness! Plus the awe and admiration of 250 of your peers!
If we get enough contributions in each category, we will announce a winner in each one. Otherwise, we will combine all the contributions and select one set of finalists and one overall winner.
Our expectation too is that all submitted PRs will be accepted into the notebooks directory, and will become part of the body of work that the initiative grows in support of our mission. So you sorta win no matter what! :)
As always, you can post requests for assistance (especially questions about our existing datasets) in the Slack channel. Your leads team--Rachel (@rachelanddata), Chris (@chris_dick), and Scott (@scottcame) will be focused on helping to orient all participants, including those working on challenge submissions, throughout the weekend. Feel free to mention or DM any of us if you need some focused help.
We are also available to help if you are new to GitHub and need assistance with forking the repo and submitting a pull request (PR).
Yes! The leads are coordinating the tagging of issues in the GitHub repo with the tag hackathon. But those are just our ideas...anything that makes a contribution to D4D and election-transparency is welcome! We just thought the challenge would be a fun way to motivate some contributions.