This is super important work, and is kind of why I built https://civic.band and https://civic.observer, which are generalized tools for monitoring civic govts. (You can search for anything, not just ALPR)
This is super important work, and is kind of why I built https://civic.band and https://civic.observer, which are generalized tools for monitoring civic govts. (You can search for anything, not just ALPR)
Seem to be getting 405s from https://civic.observer/auth/login
And 404 from https://civic.band/why.html
Fixed the 404s on civic.band, thanks
This is incredible, great work and will definitely be using and sharing this!
Where in the repos can we find the plugin/scraper for given municipalities to help contribute when they seem to be broken? As looks like the last meetings and agendas scraped for Cook County are from March/April of this year
Hello! The crawlers are not currently public, but I'm happy to take volunteers behind the curtain.
I also fixed Cook County
Also missing: Austin, TX
Fixed Austin TX!
Very cool! And important for sure, thank you.
Few questions:
- is the stack to index those open source?
- is there some standardized APIs each municipality provides, or do you go through the tedious task of building a per-municipality crawling tool?
- how often do you refresh the data? Checked a city, it has meeting minutes until 6/17, but the official website has more recent minutes (up to 12/2 at least)
Thanks for asking!
- The framework for crawling is open-source. https://github.com/civicband
- There is absolutely not a standardized API for nearly any of this. I build generalized crawlers when I can, and then build custom crawlers when I need.
- Can you let me know which city? The crawlers run for every municipality at least once every day, so that's probably a bug
very cool can you check the login page i'm getting error 405 on
https://civic.observer/auth/login
I am interested in monitoring local legislation in Clark County, WA