Sign up as a Labs Member

Anyone may sign up as a Member – just follow the sign-up steps below. Not sure what this Member thing is all about? You can find out more about Membership here.

Sign-up Steps

Signing up involves a few simple steps that should only take a minute or two. The key part is providing some information so that you can be listed on on the members page.

We also strongly recommend joining the mailing list and following Labs on twitter.

1. Put together a brief bit of info about yourself. It has 2 parts, some structured data of form item: value at the top followed by some free text (your bio). Here’s what it should look like (all items are optional except those marked as required):

   ---
   username: {your-unique-username} [REQUIRED]
   title: {your-full-name e.g. Joe Bloggs} [REQUIRED]
   area: {terse description of your main activity area e.g. Software Developer, Data Wrangler, Blogger ...}
   email: {[email protected]}
   github: {github-username}
   twitter: {twitter-username}
   web: {home page}
   img: {a link to a small square image around 200px by 200px - your gravatar is perfect}
   place: {e.g. London, UK or Nairobi, Kenya}
   permalink: /members/{your-username}/index.html [REQUIRED]
   ---
   
   A paragraph bio or description about yourself and your interests -
   you can use html!
   

   Here’s an example:

   ---
   username: rgrp
   title: Rufus Pollock
   area: Data Wrangler
   email: [email protected]
   github: rgrp
   twitter: rufuspollock
   web: http://rufuspollock.org/
   img: /img/people/rgrp.png
   place: London, UK
   permalink: /members/rgrp/index.html
   ---
   
   Rufus is an avid hacker on small data tools, an enthusiastic collector
   of new datasets and an out-of-hours data investigator. Skills include
   python, javascript, sysadmin and data wrangling.
   

2. Get this added to the Labs Github repo (and thereby to the website). There are 2 options:

   • More geeky route: add this info to the repo yourself via fork and pull – instructions below
   • Less geeky route: email it to [email protected] and we’ll take care of it for you

Geek Route

This assumes you know how to add stuff to a git repo on github (preferably via fork and pull).

1. We need to add the info above to the Labs website repo on github

2. Fork the repo

3. Create a file at this location

    members/_posts/yyyy-mm-dd-{your-username}.html
   

   where yyyy-mm-dd is the date you signed up as a member. As an example, if your username were awesomeusername and today’s date were 2013-05-17 you would create

    members/_posts/2013-05-17-awesomeusername.html
   

4. Add the info you prepared above. Save the file.

5. Commit and push.

6. Submit a pull request

Get Involved

Join our discussion list. Here, we exchange datasets and ideas and plan our projects.

Many of us also hang out and chat on Gitter:

https://gitter.im/okfn/chat

Get Hacking

Check out the projects list or the ideas page. Contribute and earn a badge!