From the post:
The success story that is OpenCorporates is very much a team effort – not just the tiny OpenCorporates core team, but the whole open data community, who from the beginning have been helping us in so many ways, from writing scrapers for company registers, to alerting us when new data is available, to helping with language or data questions.
But one of the most common questions has been, “How can I get data into OpenCorporates“. Given that OpenCorporates‘ goal is not just every company in the world but also all the public data that relates to those companies, that’s something we’ve wanted to allow, as we would not achieve that alone, and it’s something that will make OpenCorporates not just the biggest open database of company data in the world, but the biggest database of company data, open or proprietary.
To launch this new era in corporate data, we are launching a #FlashHacks campaign.
Flash What? #FlashHacks.
We are inviting all Ruby and Python botwriters to help us crowdscrape 10 million data points into OpenCorporates in 10 days.
…
How you can join the crowdscraping movement
- Join missions.opencorporates.com and sign up!
- Have a look at the datasets we have listed on the Campaign page as inspiration. You can either write bots for these or even chose your own!
- Sign up to a mission! Send a tweet pledge to say you have taken on a mission.
- Write the bot and submit on the platform.
- Tweet your success with the #FlashHacks tag! Don’t forget to upload the FlashHack design as your twitter cover photo and facebook cover photo to get more people involved.
Join us on our Google Group, share problems and solutions, and help build the open corporate data community.
If you are interested in covering this story, you can view the press release here.
Also of interest: Ruby and Python coders – can you help us?
To join this crowdscrape, sign up at: missions.opencorporates.com.
Tweet, email, post, etc.
Could be the start of a new social activity, the episodic crowdscrape.
Are crowdscrapes an answer to massive data dumps from corporate interests?
I first saw this in a tweet by Martin Tisne.