While we’re participating in Google’s Summer of Code, we’re also looking for some great developers to come spend some time learning the ins-and-outs of public datasets over the course of the summer.

If you’re a student who wants to pick up great skills– learning how to scrape and transform data, learning how to research and verify data’s accuracy or learning how to architect big-but-not-very-big datasets, or if you’re a super engineer who just wants to give back this summer, we’d be happy to talk to you.

Here are our four Sunlight Labs summer slots:

Data Cataloger

As a member of TeamRuby at SunlightLabs, you’ll be working to build out the National Data Catalog. Specifically, you’ll be building out new user administration tools for the Rails front-end application and developing new importers for the plethora of new state and municipal data catalogs coming online. If you’re interested in MongoDB, jQuery, Rails, Sinatra, Nokogiri or Mechanize, this is a great experience for you. In order to get this job, you’ll have to have some experience with Ruby and jQuery, and be interested in making your government more open and accountable.

Data Loading and Analysis

If you’re interested in brushing up or growing your python parsing and data mining skills, our data loading and analysis program may be a good fit. You will be working with Labs staff and other interns to create importers for new data sets and verify the accuracy and quality of the data. In additional, you will help develop tools and algorithms to identify entities that are referred to by different names and IDs across data sets. To get this job, you’ll need to know your python and have great SQL competency. If you’ve worked with BeautifulSoup or equivalent tech, that’s even better.

Web Application Development

We’re building a web application that helps researchers standardize and match names across different datasets. We need some help building that out, and we’d love to have someone interested in brushing up on their Django, postgres, and jQuery skills to come join us for the summer.

Content Manager

We don’t believe in content management nearly as much as we do content managers. We would love someone interested in helping us build our datasets come and work with our engineering team to make sure our data is kept up to date. We’re looking for someone who wants to help us build the twitter database of every lawmaker in the country and doesn’t mind looking them all up and adding them into a spreadsheet. We’re looking for someone who can take a look at our data in the National Data catalog and suggest logical groupings between several datasets in there. Or can suggest why they’re important. You don’t need to be technical to join us here for the summer for this job, but you may just end up learning a bit of Python or Ruby before you leave us. What we want more out of this person than anything else is the ability to write.

All these jobs are considered “internships,” by our operations department and are paid accordingly. But if you’re an experienced developer and want to come work with us for the summer and don’t want to be called an intern, we’ll call you whatever you want as long as you show up, willing to learn, work hard, and make a difference.

On our side, we’ll do our best to give you a compelling summer, appreciate you every day, and make sure you leave Washington with an understanding of how your government works and how you can make an impact in your community by creating more transparency in government.

To apply, send us a note about what you’re interested in doing here and why summer@sunlightlabs.com and we’ll get back to you.