Meet the volunteers who improved our online archive and walked away with a free t-shirt

Will you be the next to join our open-source enterprise?

By Ben Welsh

Last month, we launched a new version of this website with a simple call to action: File a patch and win a prize.

The bounty for a confirmed bug report or merged pull request to our open-source website was a t-shirt with our new logo.

The shirt

The response was rapid. Today I’m proud to announce the winners, who added to the accomplishments of our open-source community, which now can claim contributions from more than 150 volunteers.

The winners are:

  • Michael Keller, a Bloomberg reporter, who discovered a bug in our site’s footer.
  • Stephen Suen, an MIT graduate on the job hunt, who fixed that bug.
  • Nelson Pecora, a New York Magazine developer, who upgraded our code to comply with the Python programming language’s official style guide.
  • Christine Zhang, an Open News Fellow at the Los Angeles Times, who created a favicon to display in the corner of browser tabs.

If you want to get involved, there’s plenty more to do as we continue our quest to master CAL-ACCESS, the jumbled, dirty and difficult database that track money in California politics.

Kick around our site. Try out our new downloads and documentation. File any bugs or patches over on Github, or contact me directly at [email protected].