CouncilMeetingInput

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.

Free knowledge like this doesn't just help, it promote dmecroacy. Thank you.

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

• http://www.theyworkforyou.com/
• example agenda