Summer Hackathon

[christophergandrud]

Sorry everyone, I've been kind of overwhelmed with other projects the past couple of weeks.

I was thinking that to get this thing started up again it might be good for interested parties to think of a few days to a week in the summer that they would be available to work together on this close to full time.

Any interest? Preferred times?

[antagomir]

I may be coming to Berlin OKFest. Will decide by June. If yes, that could be ideal time. Otherwise I am not sure if I have a chance to contribute on this particular project as the hands are full with running rOpenGov infra issues.

[briatte]

I'll be in Berlin for OKFest, so this might work very nicely 👍

[christophergandrud]

That's great. I'll be in Berlin as well. So we should definitely meet up to cover some ground on this.

[briatte]

Dear all,

OKFest 2014 Berlin (July 15-17) has published its provisional programme, and I'm thinking of buying train tickets as soon as possible to avoid the typical high fares on France-German lines.

May I ask who will be in Berlin this July, and when?

[christophergandrud]

I'll be in Berlin from 13 July. I'm clearing time in my schedule to work on it that week.

[christophergandrud]

I'm thinking of submitting a talk to the CSVConf which is a fringe event of the OKFest.

Any thoughts?

[antagomir]

I will inform you soon about my possible participation, seems likely and would be great to meet.

I need to focus on pending issues with rOpenGov but we can hack together and strengthen the connections across these activities.

CSVconf talk is an option, too.

[briatte]

I agree, CSVconf sounds like a cool event.

[christophergandrud]

Great.

I quickly put together a talk description based on the original blog post I made introducing the package (It's supposed to be about a paragraph). Any comments are of course very welcome (especially for suggestions to slim it down). The deadline for submissions is 31 May:

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Improving access to panel-series political science data with psData

There are many commonly used, electronically available panel-series data sets in political science. However, downloading, cleaning, and merging them together is time consuming. For example, accessing and combining Reinhart and Rogoff's fiscal costs of financial crisis data, involves downloading, cleaning, and merging 4 Excel files with over 70 individual sheets, one for each country’s data.

Researchers also regularly use variables that are combinations and/or transformations of indicators in regularly updated data sets, but which themselves aren’t regularly updated. For example, Bueno de Mesquita et al. (2003) devised two variables that they called the ‘winset’ and the ‘selectorate’. These are basically specific combinations of data in two other regularly maintained data sets. However, the winset and selectorate variables haven’t been updated alongside updates to the underlying data.

In this talk we introduce the psData R package developed under rOpenGov to solve two problems:

1. Time wasted by political scientists (and their RAs) downloading, cleaning, and transforming commonly used data sets for their own research.
2. Errors introduced each time custom data importation/transformation scripts are written to do what are in fact routine tasks across the community.

The psData package aims to address these problems by distributing easy to use R functions for downloading, cleaning, and merging political science panel-series data. The package is hosted on GitHub and can be easily added to and modified by the community. When an error is found in a data importation/transformation function it can be fixed and the patch distributed to all users simultaneously, improving data quality across the entire community with minimal extra effort.

[briatte]

Hello,

Here's a remix of the abstract. I have removed the selectorate/winset example to trim it down, and tried to formulate the project in the most possible generic terms.

[christophergandrud]

I like it a lot!

If everyone else is ok with it, all we need are the number of rOpenGov OKFest attendees and we should be set.

[antagomir]

Hi, yes cool ! I think we can only give estimates of participant number so far, and I guess the extact numbers are not necessary so how about this for the concluding sentence (feel free to modify in any way you see fit): "The team behind the rOpenGov/psData project currently includes contributors from universities in three [Finland, Germany, ...?] countries, and will be present in Berlin at the time of the conference."

[christophergandrud]

From the Github members list it looks like there are at least people based in: Finland, Germany, Denmark, US. @briatte where are you based these days?