Position: Who’s Who Wiki Data Extraction Programmer
Type: Full-time staff position (following 3-6 month trial period)
Location: Mexico City, Mexico
Start Date: September or October 2012
Compensation: 12,500–20,000 MXP (approx. 1,000–1,600 USD) plus benefits, depending upon
experience
Who Are We Looking For?
Are you creative, intelligent, and committed to issues of social justice? Do you thrive in a start-up
environment? Do you have experience with web scraping and/or data mining? Are you a fluent Spanish
speaker and also able to write perfectly in English? Are you willing to live in Mexico City? And would
you relish the chance to be part of something big from the very start? PODER is a young organization
developing a new web-based platform to improve corporate transparency and accountability in Latin
America. We’re looking for an experienced programmer who is comfortable with large datasets to
coordinate data extraction for our site’s information. This person would collaborate closely with our
data architect and systems administrator, as well our team of researchers. Interested? Please keep
reading for more details.
Organizational Overview
The Project on Organizing, Development, Education, and Research (PODER) is an award-winning,
non-governmental, non-profit corporate accountability organization that leverages business
intelligence, transparency technology, and community organizing to improve corporate transparency
and accountability in Latin America and to strengthen civil society stakeholders of corporations
as long-term accountability guarantors. Our vision is of a Latin America where the citizen sector
is sufficiently powerful so as to be able to engage the public and private sectors in horizontal
accountability relationships to ensure democracy and development. To accomplish this PODER
builds power with civil society organizations (CSOs) by channeling information, know-how, capacity
building, and accompaniment to local corporate stakeholders at strategic nodes of the Latin American
economy where our work has the greatest long-term effect. Together, PODER and our partners engage
corporations and other stakeholders to ensure on-going corporate accountability. For more information,
see Ashoka (www.ashoka.org/fellow/ben-cokelet) and Echoing Green (www.echoinggreen.org/fellows/
benjamin-cokelet).
Who’s Who Wiki Project
Currently PODER is building the alpha version of Who’s Who Wiki, an innovative website whose
objectives are to track Mexican and Latin American parastatal and private companies, corporate
elites, and their government counterparts and to empower citizen stakeholders to hold these actors
accountable. This open data, open software platform will make it possible, for the first time, for
stakeholders to reward or punish corporations based on the totality of their practices, including their
human rights, labor, and environmental records. Through this platform we analyze the corporate social
network, at both national and regional levels, to further a public understanding of its individual and
corporate members. This understanding will be fundamental as investors, civil society organizations,
and other stakeholders strive to democratize capitalism in Latin America. For more information, see:
http://startsomegood.com/Venture/who_s_who_wiki/Campaigns/Show/
wiki_driven_corporate_transparency_latin_america.
Position Requirements
PODER seeks a Data Extraction Programmer for our Who’s Who Wiki project, preferably with
experience in Mexico or Latin America, to conduct web scraping and data mining for our site. This
person’s specific responsibilities will include:
·Coordinating with technical and research teams to identify and target key public and open data
resources for extraction and mining;
·Authoring and maintaining web harvesting scripts using a mix of free software libraries and some
proprietary tools to extract unstructured data from websites and services;
·Aggregating, cleaning, and merging collected data with in-house database and semantic web
platform;
·Some light system admin duties including the setup and configuration of a web proxy and local
cache of key web resources for offline research and analysis.
The successful candidate will: be detail-oriented and a multitasker; be able to set goals, prioritize
tasks, and work independently; be comfortable working in a fast-paced team environment and possess
excellent communication skills with both technical and non-technical colleagues; possess strong
writing skills in Spanish (and ideally English); speak Spanish fluently and ideally English as well; be
passionate about using their technical skills to promote progressive social change; have a strong interest
in information science, the semantic web, and related ontologies
Qualifications:
·A Bachelor of Science degree in computer science or information science, or 1-4 years of equivalent
experience. A Master of Science degree in computer science or information science is preferred.
·Expertise in at least one major scripting language (Python, Ruby, Perl, PHP, etc.) and familiarity
with others
·Experience using web harvesting software and programming techniques
·Experience with relational database design and implementation (SQL and web-access
programming)
·Some systems admin experience.
·1+ years of physical presence experience in Latin America, preferably Mexico
·Fluency in Spanish (and preferably English), including demonstrable writing experience
·Qualifications, references to withstand a rigorous background check
Desired Technical Strengths:
·Experience with HTML scraping (parsing and DOM manipulation)
·Linux shell scripting (awk, sed, regular expressions)
·Familiarity with Visual Basic scripting
·Web proxy configuration using Squid or alternative
·Practical knowledge of semantic web and related ontologies
Application
Please send a resume or curriculum vitae, 2 academic writing samples (both in English and Spanish),
3 professional references, and links to any websites about you or your work to Ben Cokelet, Executive
Director, at admin@projectpoder.org. No phone calls please. Only competitive applicants will be
contacted.
PODER ensures equal opportunity in employment or volunteer positions for all people without regard
to race, color, sexual orientation, gender identity, religion, age, ancestry, national or ethnic origin,
marital status, or disability.
ITPers can also contact ITP Alum, Jaime Villarreal for any questions jesusjaime@lavabit.com