city-bureau / city-scrapers Goto Github PK

especially using stuff via comment mode

https://sadtrombone.com/

finish #54 then move on to this

since I just copied over from the readme, there's stuff that is now in the contributing a spider guide that doesn't need to be there

Hi all,

We've built out a few sites that seem somewhat similar to the aims of this project

• http://capsure.opencityapps.org/
• https://chicago.councilmatic.org/events/

We have found that these have not been widely used.

We suspect that the main barrier to participation is not knowing when and where meetings occur, but an understanding of

• what takes place in the meeting
• why a person might go to the meeting
• how to engage in the meeting (as either as speaker or just an observer)
• does going to this meeting feel safe

A comprehensive source for the time and place of public meetings can be useful, but I'm wondering if you all are thinking of addressing any of the other barriers?

Based on a discussion, we need to document the following process for developers in the documentation:

• If a data source is difficult to scrape (data is in a PDF, image, etc.), notate that on the sources spreadsheet and don't attempt to write a scraper for it.

Tasks to close this issue:

• Add documentation on how to handle difficult to scrape sources.

Original issue content

Not sure if we want to get into trying to parse PDFs, but the Chicago Housing Authority's meetings are posted as an image and PDF.

Is it worth trying to automate the import of this information? Or is is better to just have a list of sources that a human needs to enter into the system once per year?

@r-wei

The genspider tests leave new files in the tests directory, somewhat out of necessity. Not a big deal but worth noting.

we could:

• ignore completely
• remove when finished
• do some mock stuff so they never get written

Hey @diaholliday, @eads said you would be the one to ask about this. I'd like to contribute events to your aggregator from the Rockford area. Being a municipal area with one of the larger populations in Illinois, I'd like to get some action going around documenting public meetings here, as nothing like this currently exists. Ideally, I will be able to add agencies/orgs from not just Rockford proper but including the surrounding municipalities within Winnebago county.

What is the appropriate way to go about doing this? I don't want to step on toes and it looks as if your current spreadsheet has things almost exclusively limited to Chicago and Cook County. Should I add a new tab for Rockford Area, or add Rockford and related items to their own bordered section on the appropriate tabs that already exist?

I'm looking forward to contributing!

@mwgalloway raised this issue. @diaholliday might have some thoughts about how to structure this as the open civic data specification doesn't account for it

I'd like to propose we implement a code of conduct for all project-related spaces and activities.

I'm partial to the generic code we developed at FreeGeek (and we stole a tremendous amount of it from the Geek Feminism anti-harassment policy).

cc @diaholliday

I think it would be nice to have an event validator as a part of the pipeline in order to ensure that any data that gets downstream has all of the required fields in the correct formats.

@r-wei suggested that the invoke genspider command should pull a sample file automatically for testing, which is very wise but will require some updates to the command.

The link to documentation in the readme file 404s.

Start with the documentation.

Step 1: To access the data, guess the name of the client here: http://webapi.legistar.com/
The name of the client is not:
cookcounty
cook-county
cookcountyil
cookcountygov
cookcountygovil
cookcountyilgov

Suggested by @milti

City council and committee meetings are available here:

http://ocd.datamade.us/events/?jurisdiction=ocd-jurisdiction/country:us/state:il/place:chicago/government

http://api1.chicagopolice.org/clearpath/

invoke runtests
You indicated pty=True, but your platform doesn't support the 'pty' module!

Unfortunately pseudo terminal handling is not available for Windows, and the pty=true flag prevents you from invoking runtests. Most people are probably not doing the frustrating thing of trying to run things in Windows like I am, but just case, I know one solution mentioned was to put in an os check.

This has come up a few times in various issues (#33, #5). We should evaluate the following existing projects and APIs and identify how we can leverage them to eliminate duplicated effort:

1. Open Civic Data has some scrapers already built that we should consider using:

   • python-legistar-scraper
   • opencivicdata/scrapers-us-municipal

2. Datamade has an API that is used to power Councilmatic, which displays Chicago City Council meetings.

The Cook County Clerk site uses JavaScript to load the details for events, but unfortunately, it uses ASP and therefore the AJAX requests are not as easy to fake as they would be in other web apps.

http://www.cookcountyclerk.com/countyboard/boardmeetings/Pages/default.aspx

There are probably other sites that we'll need to handle using a similar approach once we figure this one out.

There's a bunch of machinery around tests that should be built out before too many contributions are made, specifically a common approach to mocking responses so we can test parsing

... or something

The OpenCivicData spec is unclear on this point. To wit, "Starting date / time of the event. This should be fully timezone qualified."

What does that even mean?

Two top options imho:

• Gitbook
• Read The Docs

Leaning towards Gitbook.