Scraping Council Meetings
When I started working on the civic-code project, I was annoyed at the lack of accessibility when it came to accessing City Council meeting documents and videos.
The meeting index is not well organized either. You have to open up a menu just to see what documents (agenda, minutes, video link, appendices, etc.) have been added to a particular meeting.
Considering that this is still an issue, I decided that I would try to create a more structure index of the documents.
Why is indexing city council documents important, you may be asking.
Accessibility! You should not need to be an experienced politician or a policy wonk to be able to participate in municipal politics. It feels as if bureaucracy is used to discourage or limit political participation.
Here is a screenshot of the aspx site used to serve the documents:
Some questions that come to mind:
- Why are all City Council and committee meeting documents served using a custom tool?
- Why aren’t the documents categorized by meeting or committee?
- Why are all meeting document links served on the same page regardless of type?
- Why force users to check the website to see if new documents are added?
As I said in the first civics code post:
if the goal was to encourage apathy while maintaining plausible deniability, I would consider it a very effective website.
I think that this could be considered administrative burden. Our government has recognized this burden when it comes to businesses, but there is much less of an effort in cutting the red tape for citizen participation.
In my annoyance, I put together a little web-scraper to get a list of meetings with the corresponding documents. The output is still pretty raw, but this should give me what I need to create an index and the required automation to keep the index up-to-date.
To see the code used for scraping the page, check out https://github.com/dntiontk/windsor-opendata/tree/main/council-meetings.
Keep coding with purpose! ::dev