[open-data-manual] Team update: news, small tasks to spend 1/2h on this week, team stats & more

[Tim McNamara]

New Zealand has been experiencing some of its worst snowfall in a
generation, the USA has a massive heatwave. I hope that the weather
near you is okay! This week's update is largely a list of small
activities that you may be able to help out with. I think that each
task will take about 1/2h to make your way through.


Contents
======

 - German translation begins
 - micro-tasks
 - team stats
 - enabling translations

German translation begins
===================

The biggest news this week is that a German translation has been
started for the Open Data Manual. This is great to see.


Activities
======

As people undertake these tasks, please email the list with your
progress or ideas. I am happy to do the annoying jobs like updating
our project management tool, Bitbucket.

 ## Code

 - tiny geocoding guide- getting started with GeoNames
 - take a spreadsheet from an open data catalogue (thedatahub.org) and
plot that data onto a map
 - strategies for bucketing time series data, e.g.
 - an introduction into plotting and communicating many-dimensional data

## Statistics related

 - a guide about types of graphs: pick one from your favourite (box &
whisker, pie chart, ...)
 - write a few paragraphs on strengths and limitations of using means,
std deviation and other aggregate measures
 - terminology for humans: explaining what point estimates, confidence
intervals, and other terms of art mean

## Communications related

There is some useful semi-open (CC-BY-NC-SA) content at Wired's Howto
wiki (http://howto.wired.com/wiki/Open_Up_Government_Data). Would
anyone like to read through that material and see if we are missing
anything.

## Visualisation related

It would be great if we could include more pictures in the manual. If
you know of any visualisations which are freely licenced, please send
a note to this email list. We'll get them included in the manual.

Team stats
========

We have reached 39 contributors. Thanks for spreading word. Do feel
free to send anyone you know who might be interested to


Translation
========

Does anyone have experience with which tools would work best for
translating reStructuredText? I know that GNU gettext works well for
source code. However, what is the recommended procedure for Sphinx?


Best regards,

Tim McNamara