[HN Gopher] Show HN: Governments on GitHub
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       Show HN: Governments on GitHub
        
       Author : danthelion
       Score  : 50 points
       Date   : 2023-06-09 12:03 UTC (10 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (ui.rilldata.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (ui.rilldata.com)
        
       | danthelion wrote:
       | I created a dashboard to monitor government activity on GitHub
        
         | taubek wrote:
         | What is the source of your data? How do you define "government
         | activity on GitHub"? Do you look at domain used in contact,
         | affiliation, etc.?
        
           | danthelion wrote:
           | This GitHub page was the starting point:
           | https://government.github.com/community
        
             | Dunstark wrote:
             | From what I gather from this page it seems organisations
             | need to be added by the community or organisation members.
             | I know a few organisations that aren't on that list for my
             | country like https://github.com/GouvernementFR,
             | https://github.com/DISIC, https://github.com/ANSSI-FR and
             | https://github.com/ansforge. No promises but I might make a
             | PR tonight on the page you mentioned.
        
               | danthelion wrote:
               | That would be great, scraping that site is the entrypoint
               | of my data pipeline!
        
               | mlinksva wrote:
               | Just out of curiosity about how people actually access
               | stuff, does scraping mean (as I'd expect I guess) the
               | rendered website, or consuming the data files
               | https://github.com/github/government.github.com/tree/gh-
               | page... ?
               | 
               | Querying wikidata may also be useful https://github.com/g
               | ithub/government.github.com/issues/877
               | 
               | Added: note about your project at https://github.com/gith
               | ub/government.github.com/issues/1167
        
               | danthelion wrote:
               | I have missed the data file entirely and just extracted
               | all the entities from the rendered website, then enriched
               | all the repositories with some extra info through the API
               | (still ingesting some data for a few repos, hitting the
               | API limit frequently).
               | 
               | The goal is to have a deeper level view of public
               | government orgs, including a more granular view of
               | contributors and how they interact with code.
               | 
               | Great idea about wikidata! That's another data rabbit-
               | hole to climb down into.
        
             | l__l wrote:
             | Even from this page there appears to be a fair bit missing.
             | E.g. one of the biggest UK gov orgs is @alphagov (~1.6k
             | repos), which I can't seem to see on your dash?
        
       | tuukkah wrote:
       | Something broken in the source data, if I compare the
       | organisations with the list that GitHub has crowdsourced:
       | https://github.com/github/government.github.com/blob/gh-page...
        
       | addcommitpush wrote:
       | I have some doubts about the data: the government of France has
       | supposedly 1 repos, but for instance the French Statistics Office
       | has 244 repos [0], the "digital" team of the Prime Minister's
       | services has at least 537 repos, and that's what's on top of my
       | head.
       | 
       | [0] https://github.com/orgs/InseeFrLab/repositories +
       | https://github.com/orgs/InseeFr/repositories
       | 
       | [1] https://github.com/orgs/etalab/repositories +
       | https://github.com/betagouv
        
         | danthelion wrote:
         | Thanks for flagging this! These were missing from the initial
         | dataset I used as a starting point, but I can easily extend it
         | myself.
        
       | prepend wrote:
       | I don't think open issues is a very useful metric because an open
       | issue may stick around for 10 years and just stay low priority.
       | So number of open issues doesn't really mean much. Maybe instead
       | show issue velocity of how many created+closed each period to
       | show activity. Or show commits.
        
         | yieldcrv wrote:
         | they're all useless vanity metrics that cannot offer any
         | comparison to another organization or project
         | 
         | software that is complete also fails every vanity metric
        
         | danthelion wrote:
         | Yeah, I definitely agree, more sophisticated metrics are in the
         | pipeline. Wanted to get an MVP out as quickly as possible.
        
       | nonameiguess wrote:
       | No explanation of where this data is coming from or how it's
       | being labeled? Your top table on the right hand side shows seven
       | "countries" but only one of the names in there is actually the
       | name of a country (Norway).
       | 
       | It looks like you're just taking the top-level headers from that
       | "who's using Github" page? Civic Hacker is one of those and is
       | showing up as a "country" in your dataset, but clearly isn't.
       | Looking at the first few tiles, it includes at least a few US
       | cities, some US states, and Romania.
        
         | danthelion wrote:
         | I can see how the "Country" name was confusing; thank you.
         | Renamed it to "Government" for a bit more clarity.
        
       | starefossen wrote:
       | Great, but most of the Norwegian governments are missing. Here is
       | a more up to date list https://github.com/MikAoJk/norwegian-
       | public-organizations/tr...
        
       | moralestapia wrote:
       | Anyone (or the author) knows the name of the UI library the site
       | is using?
        
         | danthelion wrote:
         | The dashboard was made using
         | [rill](https://github.com/rilldata/rill), which uses Sveltekit
        
           | moralestapia wrote:
           | Awesome, great work. Thanks!
        
       | batmansmom1 wrote:
       | Can I browse the repos from this page?
        
         | danthelion wrote:
         | You can now, added the URL as a dimension!
        
       | srvmshr wrote:
       | I don't quite understand what this dashboard is aiming at. What
       | is the target objective: government participation on FOSS, being
       | mentioned, projects being funded or something else?
        
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       (page generated 2023-06-09 23:02 UTC)