A project of DataforDemocracy and RunForOffice exploring representation in federal, state, and local government.
The aim of this project is to explore diversity and inclusion at all levels of government, investigating representation across demographics including race, gender, and age, and the demographic impact on state and local politics across the United States. The initial focus is Louisiana, but the eventual goal is to expand the project to every state.
Thank you so much for being here! Awesome data scientists like you make this work possible. To get started, you can:
Become a member the DataforDemocracy Slack community by filling out the contact form here, and join the p-runforoffice channel.
Pick a state for which data is available, and let us know.
Get added to the RunForOffice GitHub organization.
Create a repository for your state.
Keep the repo name simple and clear so we can stay organized please!
Explore, analyze, visualize!
Start with simple questions. As a citizen, what's interesting to you about trends in government? How are the genders represented? How are ethnicity and race represented? Are these trends consistent across levels of government?
Document decision points and inconsistencies.
If something doesn't make sense to you, or you have to make a judgement call, we want to know about it. The goal of this project is to keep all work as transparent and reproducible as possible.
Compile a report.
Here we're looking for a clear way to communicate your results to a non-tech audience. Any format (R Markdown, Jupyter Notebook, LaTeX) works, but anything that renders to HTML or PDF is preferrable.
Questions about the project? Advice on something we could be doing better/more efficiently? Ping Jim (@Cupples) or Charlotte (@cmcclintock) on Slack! We are eager to learn from people with experience in a variety of areas.