It’s October and so Hacktoberfest has started again, a month in which everyone is encouraged to contribute to an open source project on GitHub. Repository owners/maintainers let you know if they’re participating, what you can work on during this month and after 4 approved contributions, you can get a sponsored t-shirt from the event or plant a tree.
Of course I will participate again this year, but you can also help with one of my projects! For this year I’ve an even bigger list of projects that people can contribute to and you don’t need any programming experience to make a contribution for the basic tasks I’ve in mind.
Projects from me that participate are all about retrieving open data and the NIPKaart platform, which I’ve been quietly working on for the last 2 years. If you want to know more about what NIPKaart is, check this blog.
Contribution tasks
Search for open data platforms in your area
- Difficulty: easy
- Type of contribution: non-code
I’m always looking for websites of municipalities where they publish their open datasets, to see if there might be interesting information to use. Doing this alone is quite a job and therefore you could help, simply by googling “[CITY NAME] open data” and see if you can find a platform website from the city you are searching.
Did you manage to find an open data platform website? Then the next step is to create an pull request in this repository so that I can assess it for possibilities.
Find datasets consisting of disabled parking spaces
- Difficulty: easy
- Type of contribution: non-code
This task is an extension of the first one, but focuses on searching only municipal datasets relating to the location of disabled parking spaces. Preferably, the dataset should have a format of json or geojson and the data platform should have API capability or support for WMS/WFS protocol.
Did you manage to find an dataset for disabled parking spaces? Then the next step is to create an pull request in this repository so that I can assess it for possibilities.
Extend a python package to read other datasets from a city ODP
- Difficulty: challenge
- Type of contribution: code
Is Python programming your thing? Then you could try expanding one of the many repositories to read more datasets for that specific city. A list of all repositories participating in this can be found here.
Improve the python code in the NIPKaart repositories
- Difficulty: intermediate
- Type of contribution: code
This one is also for python enthusiasts, NIPKaart has 2 repositories that are used to retrieve and push data to a database. I believe that the current code can be improved and that is why I challenge you to improve it.
With your contribution I can continue my goal for the future, to help people who are in possession of a disabled parking card with a handy platform. During hacktoberfest, new tasks may be added. So let’s start contributing!
./Klaas
Still questions?
If you still have questions after reading this article, you can always ask via Twitter, Discord (Mister Nicolaz#7558) or email. For specific questions about a project, it’s best to go to the issue of discussion site of that repository.
