Developers, developers, developers!
Here on the data.parliament.uk team, we are keen to see the wider software development community getting involved. Here are some of the things you can do.
First, Parliament is partnering this year with the National Audit Office and the Office for National Statistics for our annual hackathon, the Accountability Hack, on the weekend of 8th and 9th November. If you’d like to meet other developers interested in working with the data we provide, sign up for tickets at EventBrite — we’d love to see you there.
Even if you aren’t able to make it to the hackathon, we’d still love to see what you are doing with our data. How are you using it? What other data sources are you mashing up with it? We have a couple of MIT-licensed demonstrator projects on GitHub from which you can take some inspiration, or to fork as a starting point for your own project if desired.
Finally, you can write a library to wrap access to the data for your language of choice, so that rather than accessing the raw JSON feeds, developers can retrieve a rich object model making it easier to work with. This could be a Ruby gem, or a Python egg, or a NuGet, npm or Composer package for .NET, Node.js or PHP, or whatever is appropriate for whichever language you use. If you make your code available on GitHub and send us a link, we’ll review it and link to it from our blog.
