Opening Your Seat at the Table

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After my post yesterday about Change.gov‘s Your Seat at the Table feature, it got us thinking: what if that website disappears on January 21st? What if all that information goes away?

I posted (half seriously) on our Yammer account about 3 hours ago “Big gold star to anyone who can scrape and capture every ‘your seat at the table’ document in a Sunlight repository. I’m getting nervous that change.gov is going to disappear in a week.”

James and Jeremy independently took up the challenge. And now, three hours later we have our repository. We thought we’d share the code for you to do it too if you’d like, and also this handy csv file of all of the documents. Looks like there’s some interesting stuff in here. One can probably take this CSV file, put it in a database and start getting some context for the transition. It could answer “What are common themes the transition team is meeting about” and “What are the most popular words in documents.” Or even simply “which organization has provided the most documentation to the Transition Team.”

Anyhow, please enjoy and use wisely. You can use this to create your own archive of the “Your Seat at the Table,” as we have. This isn’t an official data-dump and won’t be considered in the contest and we won’t support the source as it is fairly specific to change.gov. But feel free to play as you see fit!