Peer Review of RO-16

Author: Nic Weber
Title: Packaging Municipal Legislative Event Data for Reuse & Exchange
Submission: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3380592
Open review: https://github.com/researchobject/ro2019/issues/4
Submitted as: RO2019 poster
Decision: accept

Review 1

Review by: Denis Parfenov https://keybase.io/prfnv

Quality of Writing

Is the text easy to follow? Are core concepts defined or referenced? Is it clear what is the author’s contribution?

(delete as appropriate)

excellent

Research Object / Zenodo

URL for a Research Object or Zenodo record provided? Guidelines http://researchobject.org/ro2019/submitting followed? Open format (e.g. HTML)? YES Sufficient metadata, e.g. links to software? YES Some form of Data Package provided? NOT SURE Add text below if you need to clarify your score.

(delete as appropriate)

good (followed guidelines, demonstrating own format, related resources included, but some details missing)

Overall evaluation

Please provide a brief review, including a justification for your scores. Both score and review text are required.

The Council Data Project (CDP) aims at addressing the challenge of making data generated legislative and executive branches of Municipal governments across the USA persistent by providing easy to use open-source tools for transcribing, indexing, modeling, and publishing legislative event data to the web. It’s stated in the abstract that “many municipal governments lack the time, money, and expertise to provide citizens with well described data”.

Although providing tools for making it easier and faster to mark the data appropriately in accordance with preferred standards may improve discoverability of data, the following is not clear from the abstract:

how do we know that the data will not disappear at some point of time in the future either intentionally or not;
how will active citizens in 2039 know whether the data generated, indexed and archived in 2019 is authentic;
how to address the lack of incentives for municipalities to allocate necessary resources (time, money) for marking data appropriately.

(delete as appropriate)

Review 2

Review by: Peter Sefton https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3545-944X

Quality of Writing

Is the text easy to follow? Are core concepts defined or referenced? Is it clear what is the author’s contribution?

The writing is competent, BUT there is not enough detail in this submission to judge it as a contribution to a workshop on packaging.

Research Object / Zenodo

URL for a Research Object or Zenodo record provided? Yes Guidelines http://researchobject.org/ro2019/submitting followed? Open format (e.g. HTML)? Yes Sufficient metadata, e.g. links to software? There are links to software Some form of Data Package provided? NO (delete as appropriate)

basic (e.g. Zenodo with PDF and minimal metadata)

Overall evaluation

This is the main reference to packaging:

… the infrastructure for interacting with, maintaining, and deploying new CDP instances has been rewritten to make the system modular to allow for developers and researchers the ability to quickly and easily generate packaged legislative event data for the municipality of their choosing

There’s no detail about the packaging format, who wrote this infrastructure or HOW developers and researchers do this quick and easy packaging.

As this is a poster submission I’m marking it as accept but a diagram showing the packaging format and how data are packaged would NEED to be on a poster. There’s really not enough here to review.

weak accept