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RECRUITING.md

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Recruiting Staff

Scratching out some notes for recruiting devs/designers.

What is eRegs

  • Goal: make regulations easier to understand
  • Parser
    • converts semi-structured regulation into a more usable form
    • uses that information to create versions of the regulation over time
    • derives extra value from the reg - citations, definitions, etc.
    • finds/processes external info, analyses, etc.
  • UI
    • Navigable, searchable interface to that data
    • Clean, clear design
    • Mobile friendly
    • Somewhat skinnable
  • Stack
    • Parser is Python, with many, many libraries
    • API and UI backend are Django
    • Frontend is Backbone + Less

Agencies

  • CFPB originated the project, has a team devoted to maintaining it for their regs. It currently holds two of their regs, but will shortly hold more
  • ATF has an instance which 18F maintains. Currently holds one reg, though this will also be expanded shortly
  • FEC liked a demo Micah put together a lot, hired their own devs to work on getting their regulation in. We provide some support, but may expand this role
  • Other agencies are interested, but aren't spun up

Short-term future

  • Import more regulations and spread to more agencies. This means tweaking our data structures, etc. to accommodate and manually inspecting results. This applies to CFPB, ATF, and FEC
  • Focus on maintainability. We currently require more or less an entire team to handle updates to regulations
  • Notice and Comment. This is a substantial new module (or even application) that would provide a nice interface for tracking how regulations are expected to change and allowing comments to be made on these changes
  • New features. Each agency will have different focuses of interest and desired functionality.

What do we need

We need multiple folks with overlapping skillsets. Some of the skillsets the project as a whole needs:

  • Architecture - there are lots of moving parts here
  • Data structures/algorithms - we aren't afraid of leveraging comp sci
  • XML processing - most of our input is XML
  • Natural Language Processing - we don't dive super deep here now (mostly relying on heuristics and keywords), but this would be a growth area
  • Python (or Ruby, Lua, other scripting languages)
  • LESS - particularly around skinning the application for additional agencies, but also for Notice and Comment and other new features
  • Javascript - particularly for Notice and Comment and potentially for other new features
  • Design - particularly for Notice and Comment and potentially for new other new features