Automating start and end dates on memberships

[showerst]

This is more of a discussion idea for when scrapers slow down than a right-now thing.

An obvious pain-point around this data is term dates. Knowing who's currently serving is the biggest piece, but it would be nice to know when they're up for re-election, and have better dates for historical data as we go forward.

If we know that someone's currently serving in State A District B, then save a few special cases (appointments, special elections), we know they must've been elected in the most recent election, and could likely look at that district's term lengths and election cycle to back into how long the term is. Then on scrape/import we could potentially match this data up and automate spitting out start/end dates.

Do we think this is something that we 1) actually can automate and 2) is worth doing.

Looking at some of the data on ballotpedia Senate House I'm wondering it's worth the effort to try and build out an extra yaml file of metadata, something like:

MO:
  term_start: "The second tuesday in january"
  lower_term_limit: 2
  upper_term_limit: 2
  lower_seats:
    - chamber: lower
      district: 6
      ocd_id: ocd-division/country:us/state:mo/sldl:6
      term_type: 2 (as opposed to 4, or 2-2-4)
      terms: 2015, 2017, 2019, 2021, 2023 (this is important in the case of 2-2-4 jurisdictions)

Thoughts? I might be over-thinking this a bit.

[joearasin]

Along these lines, one thing that would be really nice is something that, when a dataset is being merged or updated or something, does a better job of handling legislators who have new roles (i.e. used to be in the state house, now in the state senate). I manually adjusted some records in openstates/people#114, but having a process/script/whatnot around doing this in the future would be nice.