Brigade Website - project listings

ninakin · April 30, 2019, 4:47am

We noticed that projects listed on the CFA website’s Brigade Info pages pulls the most recently updated repositories in an organization. For Hack for LA’s page that means 2 of the 3 project listed are our website repo and our governance repo. And the projects that are using their own GitHub organizations will never appear.

@chris + @tdooner - I was wondering if either of you have any thoughts on how we could address this - like maybe we put up a data file that links to those projects with their own repos?

tdooner · April 30, 2019, 3:44pm

Hey @ninakin, thanks for the feedback. This is a common problem for brigades based on Github that we’re well aware of and is one reason we de-emphasized the project search functionality on the brigade website.

It’s likely that in the future we’ll move away from this Github API-based project discovery entirely, since it’s almost totally useless. (I’d love to be corrected on this, if anyone has ever used the Project Search successfully, please let me know)

This is actually already supported – you can publish a CSV of projects to use instead of Github. Here is an example from Code for Philly (which autogenerates the CSV via the Laddr platform):

github.com

codeforamerica/brigade-information/blob/master/organizations.json#L1579


        "Brigade",
        "Fellowship",
        "Code for All"
    ]
},
{
    "name": "Code for Philly",
    "website": "https://codeforphilly.org",
    "events_url": "https://www.meetup.com/Code-for-Philly/",
    "rss": "http://codeforphilly.org/project-updates?format=rss",
    "projects_list_url": "http://codeforphilly.org/projects.csv",
    "city": "Philadelphia, PA",
    "latitude": "39.9523",
    "longitude": "-75.1638",
    "type": "Brigade, Code for America, Code for America Fiscally Sponsored Brigade, Official",
    "social_profiles": {
        "facebook": "https://www.facebook.com/codeforphilly/",
        "twitter": "@codeforphilly"
    },
    "tags": [
        "Brigade",

Thanks again for the feedback. Keep it coming!

ninakin · April 30, 2019, 4:05pm

Thanks @tdooner! I figured we couldn’t be the only case, and of course there’s already a solution

I originally tagged Chris cause I was going to bring up the Project Taxonomy stuff he was interested in, but I just realized I didn’t mention that in my post. In that CSV, is there a standardized list of values for the “tags” and “status” fields?

chris · April 30, 2019, 10:01pm

@ninakin nope, they’re totally free form. That’s what we need a taxonomy project for! It needs volunteers to curate an initial official set and then moderate additions most of all

We’ve got a ways to go through before we can realize the dream of finding projects across the network

We need the taxonomy, than a reference/embeddable implementation of a tag-picker UI that project databases like laddr can use, and then to figure out how to clean up all the data that’s out there already

I don’t have the bandwidth to lead any part of this, but I could provide a lot of support to anyone/everyone who can