[open-government] [School-of-data] question city council data (Diane Mercier)

[Immanuel Giulea]

Hello all,

I think that publication of meeting minutes is a given, and almost all
cities already publish those as a matter of public record.
What is harder to get is the order of business or the "agenda" for the
meeting more than 24 hours ahead.

Some cities like Ottawa despise PDF and publish in html/web.

The city where I used to live is quite small by the urban standard, 80k
pop, but still, they were publishing agendas and minutes.

Also to be noted is that XLS is not an open format. It's proprietary.
ODF (Open Document Format) should be priviledged always before XLS.
CSV is good but I believe the new norm will be XML.

Immanuel

On Fri, Jun 21, 2013 at 2:38 PM, Liam Currie <liam.j.currie at gmail.com>wrote:

>
> I have spent an excessive amount of time looking at most of the municipal
> datasets available in Canada.  I can answer the question of how many
> council data sets exists pretty quickly:
>
> Edmonton provides the best Council data (agenda items, meeting details,
> attendance, motions, and voting records; all cross referenceable) in
> machine readable format and has API access.
> Toronto provides councillor attendance and voting records in XLS and CSV.
>  They also have the TABS program (http://tabstoronto.com/) that can
> provide a lot of detailed information and is searchable.
> Nanaimo, BC provides some basic data on the meetings along with a PDF of
> the minutes.
> Quebec City provides an up-to-date schedule of council meetings.
> Many cities such as Fredericton, NB, provide PDF versions of the meeting
> minutes.
>
> Note that this info is only up to date as of November 2012 and does not
> include the cities that have started programs after the summer of 2012.
>
> -Liam Currie
> --
>
> D309 Macintosh-Corry Hall,
> Department of Geography,
> Queen’s University, Kingston ON
> (613)329-2240
>
>
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