Open Knowledge Labs

I work on this project and the current URL is: http://okfnlabs.org/textus/ We're in the process of migrating some of the older content to this URL and would love any interested parties to contribute their skills.

cto here - I signed up to work on Grist because I like the UI, like it as a spreadsheet format, and think it has potential for decent version control - something lacking in data projects, and that I've been interested in for way too long - here I am ranting in 2013 https://okfnlabs.org/blog/2013/08/08/diffing-and-patching-data.html

FYI: I've built a datapackage manager called datapak in ruby [1][2]. datapak supports the tabular datapackages (.csv with .json schema) from the frictionless data initiative (by the open knowledge foundation). All open source and public domain. See some examples such as the Standard&Poors 500. By default the datapackage gets auto-added from .csv to an in-memory SQLite database for easy querying etc. Thanks to ActiveRecord you can use PostgreSQL, MySQL, etc. [1] https://github.com/textkit/datapak [2] http://okfnlabs.org/blog/2015/04/26/datapak.html

Yes, PDFMiner in Python https://github.com/euske/pdfminer Apache PDFBox in Java https://pdfbox.apache.org Previous discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11327493 For a list of others, see http://okfnlabs.org/blog/2016/04/19/pdf-tools-extract-text-and-data-fr…

Stefan Wehrmeyer tried this for Germany: http://okfnlabs.org/blog/2012/12/13/bundesgit-german-laws-on-github.ht… It's a solid idea. The problem is there's so much fiddly data-munging work, so it's a lot of effort to run such a tool.

ReclineJS is pretty awesome, albeit a bit slow, with larger data sets. I'd wonder how snappy it would be if it were ported over to react. http://okfnlabs.org/recline/

You might also be interested in recline.js (http://okfnlabs.org/recline/), a fork of Google refine, initially created by @maxogden, now maintained by the Open Knowledge Foundation (okfn). How their data processing features differ from openRefine is not clear to me though...

So, yet another bookmark-note-taking-whatnot-app. 1. Can you export your data? JSON preferred. 2. Is there an API? 3. How does it compare to http://okfnlabs.org/annotator/, which is free, open source and distributed?

If you run a website and enable annotator on your site you can allow anonymous annotations. However, for the bookmarklet you have to sign up. If you just wanted to try it out you could do so at http://okfnlabs.org/annotator/demo/.

"Have you considered creating a bit of javascript that any site can embed on their site that would allow a visitor to annotate?" Yes, we have. It's there on the front page if you scroll down! http://annotateit.org/#develop "Also, have you considered making it anonymous to start like github:gist?" Well, you can certainly try out Annotator using the demo at http://okfnlabs.org/annotator/demo/

From your description I am missing one important idea that you should communicate clearly: you, we and nobody else currently wants to have online voting - what we want to have, are tools that enable transparency and gathering of information, also discussions and preparation of decisions, but the final decision is something you do NOT want to do online. See this talk from 31C3: http://media.ccc.de/browse/congress/2014/31c3_-_6344_-_en_-_saal_1_-_2… If you still believe that online voting is doable and a great thing, please contact Mr. Halderman and talk to him or read about his work: https://jhalderm.com/ Also I recommend to do some research what the german pirate party is using regarding democracy tools - they have a lot of experience not only coding such tools, but also with real life usage. A good start could be https://liqd.net/en/ here you can find the adhocracy platform: https://github.com/liqd/adhocracy/ which seems to be in a much better developed state than what I see on democracyOS - but maybe there are many things not visible right now to me, so sorry for this criticism. Adhocracy is currently in use by several organizations and they have lots of real life experience, especially with user adaption. An interesting application of adhocracy is https://offenekommune.de/ Another interesting tool for organizing (really big) meetings: http://openslides.org/en/ and of course…