On 17 Jun , at 11:30:28, Tom Steinberg wrote:
> Hi there, > > Cool - great to see people hacking on councils, it's been something > I've wanted to see for ages. > > I see you've gone straight for getting the councillors of several > different councils, but I'd actually suggest going deeper rather than > wider. Why not just dive deep into one council and see if you can get > transcripts or other documents nicely scraped and parsed? I'd love to > see at least a handful of councils in TheyWorkForYou proper by the end > of the year. > I think the council stuff is very cool. but I think it'll make things very very confusing to mix local and parlimentary data on the same site. especially if it's only a handful. stef > Well done anyway! > > Tom > > 2009/6/16 CountCulture <[email protected]>: >> Quick note about something I've been working on in my spare time: >> >> http://theyworkforyoulocal.com -- a small app to scrape and parse >> local >> authority info. >> >> At the moment, it's barely more than a proof of concept, with only >> about >> 20 or so councils parsed, and even then only current councillors, >> committees, committee membership and forthcoming meetings are parsed. >> >> On the upside, it's fairly quick for me to add new parsers for >> councils >> (and reuse ones already written if they use same CMS), there's an API >> built in (basically just add .json or .xml to get the info as json or >> XML), and there's lots of potential. >> >> Getting this far has also been an education in understanding what a >> full-blown twfy_local might look like (in general there seems no >> way to >> see how councillors voted, for example), the need for such a resource >> (there's no publicly available central repository for council >> election >> results, for example), and the sorry state of local authority >> websites >> (just finding a list of councillors is a challenge on some, and don't >> get me started on the HTML markup). >> >> Comments welcome. Code is at >> http://github.com/CountCulture/twfy_local_parser/ (I'll probably >> GPL it >> soon). Bug reports at >> http://github.com/CountCulture/twfy_local_parser/issues and offers of >> help to countculture at googlemail dot com. >> >> I'd especially be interested in hearing from anyone who's got any >> knowledge about local authority CMSs (e.g. there seem to be several >> different versions of Modern.Gov producing different URLs), or >> sources >> for more data other than the local authority websites (e.g. eGR, >> info4local). >> >> Cheers >> >> C >> >> _______________________________________________ >> Mailing list [email protected] >> Archive, settings, or unsubscribe: >> https://secure.mysociety.org/admin/lists/mailman/listinfo/developers-public >> > > _______________________________________________ > Mailing list [email protected] > Archive, settings, or unsubscribe: > https://secure.mysociety.org/admin/lists/mailman/listinfo/developers-public -- /* Stefan Magdalinski +447769 666528 (phone) smagdali (IM/twitter/flickr/dopplr/skype/etc) */ _______________________________________________ Mailing list [email protected] Archive, settings, or unsubscribe: https://secure.mysociety.org/admin/lists/mailman/listinfo/developers-public
