They came, they saw, they entered Metadata

We had a great turnout last Saturday for our first Metadata Sprint. Volunteers joined us from cities around the country including Brooklyn, Chicago, Louisville, Milwaukee, Minneapolis, Philadelphia, and Phoenix - plus our bi-coastal OpenElections team hosting from D.C., San Francisco and L.A..

We worked diligently for three hours and between 13 of us collectively entered 193 elections into our system, making progress on 15 states, and almost doubling the number of elections entered so far.

Ahead of the pack were Milwaukee Journal Sentinel news app developer Allan James Vestal, with 29 elections entered, and MIT Electronics and Computer Science student and news app developer Joanna Kao, with 22 elections.

A big thank you to both of your for being OpenElections Rock Stars!

@allanjvestal                         @joannaskao

We also had lively discussions about the quirks in electoral processes in various states including stumbling across a 2011 race in Arkansas in which one person voted from the Hot Springs airport, all sorts of unusual candidate names (real and otherwise) including 'Grand-Pa' Goshorn in Arizona in 2010, and various colorful stories about candidates and races from the beats of reporters in the group.

We also got great feedback on our Metadata admin, and flushed out some great edge cases for the nuanced and wildly varied ways that people vote from state to state that we hadn't accounted for in our admin. Surveying local electoral processes across the country is a very colorful and telling process. While we have a better idea of the scale of the task in front of us, we also learned that we can do it. A reminder: we still have several states up for adoption, so if you're interested in joining the effort, let us know.

Thank you to all of you who came out! Let's do it again soon!