Gregory Foster
Founder Citizen Observer at Cannabis Data
Olympia, Washington, United States
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolGregory Foster is a founder and civic technologist with over a decade of experience building tools and communities that close the gap between the public and public servants. As the creator of Cannabis Observer and founder of Cannabis Data, he combines journalism, open government practice, and software engineering to produce timely, contextualized information that improves policymaking and civic engagement in Washington state and beyond. He brings hands-on backend experience—from early Java and web platforms to adapting OpenStates scrapers for Texas—to projects that prioritize transparency, accountability, and practical impact. A bridge-builder by temperament, he couples technical depth with a commitment to respectful, long-term stakeholder relationships and scalable methods that could be applied across policy verticals and jurisdictions. An understated detail: his work blends newsroom discipline with product development, having launched intrapreneurial tools at Consumer Reports and open-sourced tooling that supports public-legislative data access.
11 years of coding experience
14 years of employment as a software developer
Computer Science, Psychology, Computer Science, Psychology at Texas A&M UniversityLondon School of Economics and Political ScienceSoftware Localization, Internationalization, and Globalization, Software Localization, Internationalization, and Globalization at Austin Community College
Github Skills (5)
e-government10
scraper10
g10
python10
lxml8
Programming languages (7)
Github contributions (5)
openstates/openstates-scrapers
Mar 2017 - Mar 2017
source for Open States scrapers
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:6 commits, 1 PR, 5 comments in 1 day
Contributions summary:Gregory focused on adapting the Open States scrapers for Texas (TX) government data. Their work involved modifying existing scrapers to extract and represent data, including adding legislative URLs, updating contact details, and converting scrapers to the pupa format. These changes were primarily focused on the TX jurisdiction and required adjustments to metadata and data structures to align with the project's goals of providing open access to state legislative information. The user also integrated the `TXPersonScraper` into the metadata.
scraperpythongovernmentscrapers
Data4Democracy/wh-financial-disclosures
Apr 2017 - Apr 2017
Data collection and analysis around the financial disclosures from the Office of Government Ethics
Contributions:13 commits, 13 PRs, 6 pushes in 3 days
financialstock-marketpythonfinancial-disclosuresdisclosures
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