Help create an open data format for Congressional contact forms

1 - Drag this link: Contact Congress to your bookmarks bar.
The bookmarklet seems to be having problems in Firefox, please use Chrome if you can until we fix.

2 - Join the IRC chat room via this web interface or your own client (irc.freenode.net, #opencongress).

3 - Take a look at the contact-congress Github Repo

4 - Check the list at the bottom of this page and find a representative with a status badge of "YAML not found."

5 - In the list below click the Github link, find the related Github issue, and add a comment saying that you plan on working on that representative.

We recommend watching the video first, as it'll make this part much simpler to understand.

Make sure you completed #5 above and claimed a rep's Github issue before starting work on generating YAML.

1 - Find the Rep's contact page using a Google search.

2 - Click the bookmarklet (you'll need to allow popups). Select the correct form from the list shown in the popup. The bookmarklet will attempt to automatically match the inputs to our predefined YAML variables, but it'll likely miss a few. Make sure that any required fields are marked as such in the popup. Required fields are ones that need to be changed in order for the form to submit correctly.

3 - Once you're done, click "Next" in the popup. The bookmarklet will fill the form with its default values automatically. Now press the submit button at the end of member of Congress's form.

4 - If there's a second page to the form, click the "Next Form" button and repeat the process above (otherwise you can skip to the next step). Note that depending on the type of form, you might be asked for a "Selector to find before proceeding." This is so that any parsers can tell when the second part of the form has loaded. You can usually use the form's selectors from the dropdown above, but in rare cases you may need to change later down the road. When you're done, click the 'Next' button in the bookmarklet again, and then submit the form on the member of Congress's site.

5 - You'll now likely be onto the Congress member's "success" page. If something's gone wrong, you'll have to start again. Otherwise, click the "Finished" button in the bookmarklet. Select some text from the legislator's success page that will identify the request as having worked, and paste it into the success message box on the popup. Avoid copying across html tags by find a part of the success page that is plain text.

6 - Click the "Done! Let's send it to Github!" button, then click the "new file on Github" link and copy the resulting YAML text into the new file. In your commit mesage, include something like "First pass at #123," where 123 is the Github issue associated with the congress member you're working on.

7 - Now submit your change as a pull request, and wait for it to be accepted. We'll try to accept Github issues as quickly as soon as we see them.

1 - Find the Congress member's name in the list below and click the "tools" link.

2 - Check the "updated at" time to make sure that the latest version of your YAML file has been uploaded. The times are updated every minute.

3 - Click to populate the form with default values, then click to submit it to your representative. You'll get a success or error message after a few seconds.

4 - If there's an error, look in the "Recent Fill Attempts" section and click on the top entry. You'll see a screenshot and an error message.

5 - Based on the legislator's contact form, the YAML file you've generated, and the error message, try and figure out what's causing the issue. This csv of valid addresses for each representative may help. Make changes to your YAML file, resubmit them, and wait for the status message to update. If you continue to have problems, add a note to your Github issue and ping us on IRC.

6 - Once the YAML file is submitting properly, you can close your representative's Github issue!
For the first few, ping us in IRC and we'll close for you. After that we'll make you a collaborator on the rep.

There are quite a few untested or failing YAML files in the dataset at the moment. Help us out by testing them and fixing any problems.