Hello, Progressive Data World!

Welcome to the new Parsons blog, on the new Parsons website!

The goal of Parsons has always been to make data more accessible to movement activists and organizations. Early on, the focus was on writing code that others could use. While that’s still a key part of what we do, we’ve expanded our activities to include training and community-building. We want to create a space where people can share advice and code, help mentor each other, build relationships, forge new collaborations and more.

Here are some of the things you can find on the new website:

• Our events page, which contains our public events calendar. Take a look at our upcoming events or browse past events, most of which have recordings and interactive guides associated with them.

• You can also browse our list of guides directly. These are written to help people with a variety of data and technology tasks, from using the command line and working with Git to writing Python and authenticating to APIs.

• Our use cases are Parsons scripts edited for readability and shared with the community.

And then, of course, there’s the blog itself—you know, that thing you’re reading right now? ;)

We want the blog to be a place for members of the community to share our journeys in the progressive data and tech ecosystem. Anyone is welcome to contribute a post talking about something you’ve learned, a tool you love, a problem you’d like to see solved, or a cool project or script you’ve been working on. To contribute to the blog, join the #blog channel and share your ideas.

If you want to get involved with Parsons generally, there are many ways to participate.

First things first—you’ll want to join our Slack. To do so, email [email protected] to get an invite. Once you’ve joined, say hello in #introductions.

You can also join our Parsons Parties, our biweekly hangout which occurs every other Thursday from 2pm-4pm ET. Every Parsons Party is either an hour long training or a contributor meeting, followed by an hour of drop-in time for folks to ask questions, get help, or just chat. You can see the schedule for Parsons Parties on the events page.

From there, there are so many ways to participate. You can use Parsons, and give us feedback about your experience. You can report bugs on the issue tracker. You can pair program with other community members. You can attend a training and learn how to write your own scripts, create a data pipeline, contribute to open source projects, and more. You can document the things you’re learning by writing about them for this blog.

Whatever your goals are—however you want to grow—we want to support you. So come join the Parsons Project. We can’t wait to meet you.