Contributing to OpenPowerlifting

I have been training in powerlifting for a year and just competed in a national federation meet, so OpenPowerlifting is a meaningful open source project to me. It is not just a website with rankings. It is also a public dataset that people use to analyze the sport, build tools, and even publish research. Seeing the list of papers, presentations, and projects built on top of the data made that very clear to me. That combination is hard to beat: a project connected to one of my interests, useful to a real community, and close to “contributing to science and history” through better public data. Starting from a concrete problem The part I ended up focusing on was the path from official meet results to OpenPowerlifting-ready data. For the federation I worked on, FIPL, the official results are published as PDFs. OpenPowerlifting, on the other hand, stores structured CSV files in a public repository with a specific schema. On paper that sounds straightforward: take the PDF, extract the data,…