[open-government] Idea: General City Council API

Mon Dec 9 16:08:21 UTC 2013

Matt MacDonald has been working on this for http://www.nearbyfyi.com/ The blog has many relevant posts. See also their Knight News Challenge submission: http://opengov.newschallenge.org/open/open-government/submission/a-network-of-regionalized-online-services-for-cities-and-towns/

OpenPlans (creators of Open311) have also done work around meetings, see http://openplans.org/2013/03/we-want-to-make-meetings-matter/ and http://opengov.newschallenge.org/open/open-government/submission/making-meetings-matter/

Jerry Hall has been working on http://ecitizens.org/ and can point you to tons of other work on this subject - and, yes, there is yet another Knight News Challenge submission: http://opengov.newschallenge.org/open/open-government/submission/are-you-an-ecitizen-laying-a-foundation-for-better-citizen-government-communications/

Outside these initiatives, which have a greater or lesser focus on standardization, there's of course all the major software vendors to governments for creating and editing agendas and minutes. Granicus is the biggest in the US, and their Legistar API makes these documents available in machine-readable formats. They are possibly the most open to working with the open government community.

I recommend joining the Sunlight Labs list https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/sunlightlabs as most of this work is being done in the US, and the OG list's membership is more EU-based.

James

On 2013-12-08, at 10:59 AM, Antti Jogi Poikola wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> It would be great to have a de facto standard format API for city council agendas / meeting minutes. This would be doing the same for decision making data that http://open311.org/ is doing for the issue reporting in cities.
> 
> Do you know any examples or other relevant references to this idea (which for sure is not a new idea):
> 
> Examples I have come around so far are:
> - http://dev.hel.fi/apis/openahjo/
> - http://openlylocal.com/info/api
> - http://www.programmableweb.com/api/pdxcouncilconnect
> 
> -Jogi
> 
> 
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