Welcome! We are so glad you are interested in helping to empower the entire Data for Democracy community by building great tools for everyone to use. This guide is meant as a starting point for people who are looking to get involved.
Make sure to read our readme for background information.
- Are you familiar with using GitHub in a group project?
- Yes? Skip
- No? Follow the GitHub tutorial in our github-playground Submit a PR (It can be anything!)
- Bonus round: Improve the tutorial
- Are you interested in doing analysis?
- No? Skip
- Yes? Take a look at our exploratory notebooks. Explore some existing data or upload your own interesting analysis. The purpose of this is to inspire yourself and others to begin thinking critically about data. It does not have to be polished or even accurate that's why we call them exploratory.
- Bonus Round: Have domain expertise in a specific field or already have a topic that interests you? Upload new data with questions for other analysts to work on. See how-to-submit-a-dataset
- Are you still interested in doing analysis?
- Can't think of any good questions to ask? Welcome to the hardest part of "data science"
- Yes? Propose a new project by submitting a new issue with the tag
proposal. - Bonus Round: Want to work on parsing/cleaning for NLP or linguistic modeling on tweets? Or maybe on community detection (option 1) (option 2) (option 3).
- Are you interested in building tools?
- No? Skip
- Yes?
- Comfortable with twitter, facebook or reddit's API?
- Yes? Skip
- No? Take a look at our tutorials. Try gathering data on a topic that interests you.
- Bonus Round: Submit a pull request to improve existing tutorials or write new ones.
- Comfortable with twitter, facebook or reddit's API?
- Are you still interested in building tools?
- Read about our existing tools in assemble, collect-social, discursive. Fork & clone any project you are interested in working on (if you are not sure how to do this now is a good time to revisit step 1). Follow the readme and try to get yourself up and running.
- Bonus Round: We acknowledge documentation is weak in this area. PLEASE help us improve it.
- Up and running? Browse the open issues.
- Find one you want to tackle? Post in an issue or ping a project lead on slack.
- Interested but not sure you'll be able to tackle the entire issue? Offer to tag team the issue with someone else. See someone offering to tag team an issue but not sure how to start. BE BRAVE, we have faith in you (and we'll be there to pick each other up if we stumble)
- Wow! Still interested in building tools?
- Propose a new tool by submitting a new issue with the tag
proposal
- Propose a new tool by submitting a new issue with the tag
- Want to mentor new members?
- Don't feel qualified? Offer to help anyway. You will learn more by teaching than doing. See someone new join slack? Say hello, offer to help them get started. Stay on the lookout for people with questions, help them get up to speed! Have problems? Open issues, help match people with issues. This is OUR community. Everyone is empowered to step in and provide guidance/help/assistance where they see it is needed.
- Feel qualified? This person does not exist, carry on
- Bonus Round: Improve this guide.
- Still not sure where to start or feel like #assemble may not be the project for you?
- Introduce yourself in #onboarding. Start talking to project leads, let them know what you are interested in.