CouncilMeetingInput

From PortlandWiki
Jump to navigation Jump to search

Summary

1. Improve notification and discoverability of what's on city council meeting agendas.

2. Allow people to comment on upcoming agenda items.

3. Provide a way to track issues over time.

People

  • Dietrich Ayala (Mozilla)
  • Phillip Holmstrand (City of Portland)
  • Oscar Godson (City of Portland)

Implementation

City of Portland data (all XML, not yet available)

  • meetings feed: A feed of city council meetings, each entry linking to the details of a given week's meeting. updated 4pm every Friday. eg: at 4pm Friday, the newest item in the feed will be the upcoming Monday meeting's agenda, and the previous Monday's meetings.
  • agenda feeds: The feed of items for a given meeting's agenda.
  • future discussion feed: A feed of general topics planned for discussion at future meetings.

Data storage and access

  • store agenda items in couchdb at pdxapi.com
  • expose views for lists, searches
  • expose atom feeds for list and search results

Application

  • web app for voting/commenting on individual agenda items
  • notifications via twitter: an account that updates when the new agenda is available, linking to input pages

Notification

  • Atom/RSS feeds of items on the upcoming meeting agenda
  • Atom/RSS feeds of keyword searches of upcoming meeting agenda
  • Twitter notifications of agenda publication

Input

Public should be able to comment on each agenda item

Implementation approaches

  • each agenda item as a blog post w/ comments
  • Reddit style - each agenda item has up/down vote and comments

Resolution

Long term project, low priority for now.

  • timestamp in video per item
  • what action was taken
  • tracking item relations for resolution
  • if an agenda item concerns previous agenda items, link it, and mechanically expose it

Council Meeting Data

Council meeting agendas contain the following high-level parts, each composed of individual agenda items.

  • communications to council: citizens have 3 minutes to talk about whatever they want
  • time-certain items (has owner, vote)
  • consent agenda - 100% covered unless pulled (has owner, vote)
  • regular agenda - mostly covered, can vote to address later (has owner, vote)

Agenda Items

  • agenda id
  • item id
    • need to make unique by compounding with date.
  • owner
    • commissioner in charge (multiple)
    • bureau involved (multiple)
  • description
  • emergency
  • session date
  • session location
  • yea/nea (including who went which way)
  • video link (to city web page, b/c video not available yet)
  • transcript link
  • document link
  • hashtags
  • associated item numbers

References