governors repository?

[AlJohri]

I find myself needing governor data in a similar format to this repository quite frequently (especially around election time) so I was wondering if there's any examples of a similarly maintained governors repository. Closest I found was this but it doesn't have historical data or the reason a governor is leaving (term-limited or retiring).

I took a stab at creating this file: https://github.com/AlJohri/governors/blob/master/governors.yaml

It scrapes the historical and current governors from NGA (https://classic.nga.org/cms/FormerGovBios) and tries to add votesmart and AP ids.

Remaining work will be:

• scraping term length per state (and potentially max term limits)
• determining anticipated end dates for each current governor (currently listed null) by looking at the term length for each state
• identifying which governors are term limited by scraping the NGA election pages for each year. this can also be done algorithmically but that sounds slightly more complicated given the different rules regarding max term limits per state
• (bonus) currently, consecutive terms are listed as a single term in the data. split this up based on the term length per state

Do you know of any existing efforts to do this? If not, would this be a good candidate for the unitedstates organization? Thanks!

http://www.thegreenpapers.com/slg/oes.phtml

[jlev]

Hey AJ, thanks for doing this. In my use of the unitedstates data, I need contact information so that constituents can call their representatives and decision-makers. I have a small scraper that also gets current phone and fax numbers, at https://github.com/OpenSourceActivismTech/us-governors

This is clearly of less importance for historical governors, but feel free to take anything from there that's helpful.