Data Packages

[Scribbler2099]

It would be cool if there were some pre-created, community maintained data packages that people could import and use.  For example 'Media Outlets' or 'Elected representatives', and people could import it into their civicrm build.  That way each group that wants a list of elected representatives wouldn't have to track and update the list on their own.

[petednz]

Media outlets where? Globally?

EDIT - that was too brief.

Yes I have had the same thoughts in the past - but given the international dimension, and the issue about 'who' keeps the media outlet list updated - and categorised appropriately etc - i kind of gave the idea away

But perhaps you have some realistic thoughts on how this could be done.

[Scribbler2099]

I don't know about the specifics of getting something like this to work for civicrm, but I know that commercial crm's do stuff like that for like political campaigns, etc.  But there is an incentive to keep that information under lock and key for them.  I guess the trick would be in finding a group of people who feel like that sort of information is worth while to be open source and find a way to incentivize people to do it - whether through crowd sourcing or something.

[petednz]

and remembering that civi is trying to be an international solution where i suspect many of the commercial crms you mention may be more focussed

[JonGold]

There are many services that provide this information in CRM-agnostic formats - the problem is that you need to pay!  See anywho.com, cision.com, etc.

For crowdsourced solutions for U.S. elected officials, see Contact Congress and the Sunlight Foundation:
https://github.com/unitedstates/contact-congress
http://sunlightfoundation.com/

For free non-crowdsourced solutions, see the Google Civic API and the New York Times Districts API:
https://developers.google.com/civic-information/
http://developer.nytimes.com/docs

Palante Tech has rewritten the existing Drupal Sunlight/CiviCRM integration module as an extension, so it's CRM-agnostic and works with modern versions of CiviCRM.  It's in an alpha state right now, and we expect to release it in the next month or two - contact me privately if you want to look at it sooner.