Introduction, and initial Popolo based API

Hello,

My name is Edmund von der Burg and am a developer at mySociety - a UK
charity that develops and maintains a variety of transparency
websites.

We intend to use the Popolo standard for several of our sites, and to
back these sites with open APIs so that the content is easily shared
with others. With this in mind I've created an initial API server:

  https://github.com/mysociety/popit-api

Currently it is extremely minimal, but it will validate all writes to
ensure that they are Popolo compliant. Our intention is to add
features to it as we find them to be needed. I'll start trying to move
data from the Kenyan monitoring site http://mzalendo.com into it soon.
We're also intending to produce a Django app that will be able to
slurp data from this API and store it locally so that you can use the
standard Django ORM tools to search and retrieve the data (Mzalendo
being a Django project). I'll announce that here as well when it is at
an appropriate stage[1].

We'll be contributing to the Popolo  standard as we work with real
data and bump into issues.

If you are working with Node it should be easy to embed in your app,
if not it should be easy to run on a service like Heroku or dotCloud
(pull requests welcome if you add configuration to make that easier).
Eventually this will form the API part of our larger PopIt project -
which aims to make it as easy to start a monitoring site as it is to
start a blog.


Finally a huge thank you to James for pushing the Popolo project
forwards, having a standard to work to is excellent.


Cheers,
  Edmund.

[1] it is a safe bet the repo will be called 'popit-django' if you
like pre-alpha code.

Received on Friday, 22 March 2013 22:06:11 UTC