Using open source for activism and passion projects of digital archives.
One of WordPress’ big claims is that it democratizing publishing. In recent years, it’s also begun democratizing the distribution and consumption of data via the Rest API, and it’s helped push the openness of Data, which can be used by anyone to make the world a little better.
Having built many sites in many different CMS tools, ranging from Jekyll and Hugo to MediaWiki and Sharepoint, WordPress still makes it easiest to share the data in more ways than just plain old HTML. By allowing us to output our content in JSON with that API, we can create paths for people to transmute our data and display it in new ways we never dreamed of.
In the last two years, I’ve been able to take my simply hobby site from a list of information to a open API for people to get lost in like Wikipedia to an open-data resource for all people to generate dynamic results. Without data we cannot come to accurate conclusions about the world, and without OPEN data, we cannot work together to make the world better.
Taking a hobby as a vector for change didn’t happen overnight. It came with toil and hard work. It came with research of plugins and solutions. It came with hours and hours of watching TV just to come up with a reasonably accurate list of all the queer females on television, and if they were alive or dead. And with this data, we’ve been able to help news reporters and tv show writers visualize the impact on the world. We’ve started to change the world, just a little, with WordPress.
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