[open-government] Idea: General City Council API

Mon Dec 9 16:20:36 UTC 2013

Copying my colleague James Turk, who leads Sunlight's Open
States<http://openstates.org>team -- OS and
opencivicdata.org include support for agenda data.

For meeting minutes, there are a few initiatives I'm aware of, but I don't
know that they're widely supported yet. Akoma Ntoso has a "debate record"
document type. And I know that MySociety's components strategy envisions a
"SayIt" hansard system, though I'm unsure of its current status.

Sunlight's own debate analysis site is Capitol Words<http://capitolwords.org>,
but it doesn't yet offer much in the way of data format guidance. We're
likely to be taking a closer look at the site in the new year, though. For
now, I'd say that James M.'s pointer toward Granicus is an excellent
suggestion.

Tom

On Mon, Dec 9, 2013 at 11:08 AM, James McKinney <james at opennorth.ca> wrote:

> 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
> >
> >
> > --
> > +358 44 337 5439
> > about.me/apoikola
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