FDPA volunteers who use Action Network often find themselves having to deal with the data we keep about ours supporters, whether it’s choosing people to target for an email, counting petition signatures or simply looking up a phone number.
If you’re one of those volunteers, you know that our Action Network database has many fields, often with confusing or overlapping names, unknown ownership and unclear purpose (to you). This is a direct result of the grassroots approach FDPA has chosen to adopt, and which Action Network accommodates by allowing federated creation and management of data fields and values. It allows for lots of flexibility and accommodation of local needs, but also presents some challenges for the information we’d like to keep in common.
Consequently, the Action Network team has taken some steps to improve the quality and consistency of key activist data that we all use, namely: email addresses, names, mailing addresses, phone numbers, legislative districts, municipalities and school districts.
To help you understand exactly what we mean by this, you can find a “data on a page” document HERE (OK it’s not a page) that describes our critical, shared data.
The document is self-explanatory, but there are two columns that might not be familiar to you:
- Validation: this refers to rules that apply to a particular field that restrict its values in some way. For example, the “Senate District” field is limited to values from 1 to 50.
- Syndicated: indicates that the field is available to everyone and that’s its value is shared. If someone makes a change to it, everyone sees the change. This puts some added responsibility on those who update data, but is, in our judgement, better than having independent local copies that can get out of synch.
Please let us know if you have comments, questions or if you spot bad core data. We have automated tools available that allow us, in many cases, to correct data in bulk with a reasonable level of effort and a big benefit to all.