[open-government] Idea: General City Council API

[James McKinney]

Indeed, OpenCivicData's Event schema (which can be used for meetings with agendas) can be found here: https://github.com/opencivicdata/pupa/blob/master/pupa/models/schemas/event.py

Minutes vary greatly from one jurisdiction to the next. Some are closer to transcripts (Tom Lee mentions several relevant projects), while others look a lot like agendas with more details filled in, e.g. vote outcomes. FYI, SayIt is progressing nicely - I saw a demo earlier this fall, and it can import speeches in Akoma Ntoso format. Code is at https://github.com/mysociety/sayit

The super-class to agendas, minutes, transcripts, etc. would be "documents" - I've collected some of the existing standards/projects at https://github.com/opennorth/popolo-spec/issues/13 some of which are more relevant to agendas and minutes.

James

On 2013-12-09, at 11:20 AM, Tom Lee wrote:

> Copying my colleague James Turk, who leads Sunlight's Open States 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, 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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