This post is the part of a weekly blogpost series updating you on what’s going on at OpenCorporates this week. Want to help us get more data? Claim a mission!
Data the OpenCorporates team is scraping…. from the Data team (Peter & Shyam)
Business licenses. Business licenses are interesting because they contain information about business activities and may have information like trading names and addresses. In the past two weeks, we scraped business licenses from more US states including New Hampshire, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oregon, Colorado, North Carolina and Delaware. The team also tweaked the company fetchers for Uganda and Tunisia.
Bots submitted by community members…. from Peter Evans.
Peter is on holiday so I’m taking over this briefing. We’ve got 18 bots in development through #FlashHacks and a few being submitted already including sailingspring’s scraper for the Banks in Seychelles! There will be a lot to report next week!
Star scraper of the week: We were so impressed by everyone this week at the events that we said everyone is a winner. Is that cheating? Maybe! Worry not, we might have two winners next week!
Do you want to join the fun and claim an Open Data mission? Here’s what Peter suggests.
MEDIUM : Write a bot for Finance Licences (securities) – Tunisia
MEDIUM : Write a bot for Finance Licences (securities) – San Tome & Principe
HARD : Write a bot for Finance Licences (securities) – Indonesia
Campaign & Community Update – #MaptheBanks … from Hera & Seb.
Our #FlashHacks in London & Madrid went really well. You can catch up with all the amazing tweets from it by following the hashtag on twitter. We had about 27 people in London and 12 people in Madrid, most of which were coders and tried their hand at finishing a bot. Civio has written a blog about their experience of running Madrid’s first #FlashHacks which you can read here. We are hosting a #FlashHacks event in Berlin (24th March) at the end of this month to scrap more financial licenses for Map the Banks. If you’ve got friends there, why not invite them?
Our Slack experiment is also going really well so if you want to be part of our community and get live feedback on bots, data sources or just complain about PDFs – request an invite by emailing hera@opencorporates.com
Events we are attending & speaking at….
- Chris is jetting off for an LEI Foundation meeting.
- We have a #FlashHacks in Berlin.
Know of any event we should be going to?
The next #FlashHacks is…
Berlin, 29th March, 6-10pm >> Join Us!
Want to host your own #FlashHacks? Get in touch hera@opencorporates.com .
Tweet of the Week
What else?
- Seb says we’re scaling our elasticsearch indexing using Mesos and Marathon, and that’s exciting ‘if you know what it means’.
- There was the solar eclipse, here is a picture a friend of mine, @labudis, took in EDINBURGH:
- Ben bought some steel-reinforced fibre-optic cable and some second-hand lasers to connect up his new garden office, so that it’s a proper operations centre.
- I’m(Hera!) a cricket fan and will be in mourning because Pakistan will be kicked out of the world cup, once again.
- Shyam tried an old recipe for crisps where he boiled, seasoned and sundried potato chips for 8 hours and says the result was “so much better than those nasty packed ones”. He is looking for suggestions for flavours he should try! Drop him a tweet on @shyamperi.
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