I know a lot about Liverpool City Council. I've got a project to webscrape the meeting calender and produce alerts on this:
http://councillors.liverpool.gov.uk/mgCalendarMonthView.aspx?GL=1&bcr=1 I'm also attempting to get the contracts the city has signed with suppliers. More later, Julian. On Wed, Jun 17, 2009 at 12:46 PM, Tim Duckett <[email protected]> wrote: > > This is interesting - there's a small group of us doing something > similar with (or should that be *to*?) Sheffield City Council, and > it's a nightmare. Where meeting minutes exist online they're > published as Word docs, and they're written in a "narrative" style - > for all its faults, Hansard is a world away from local government when > it comes to scrapeable transparency. So far we've been working on > indexing the docs and presenting that content alongside search results > from the main SCC site. It's not TWFY, but at least it provides a > better way of exposing individual activity that would otherwise be > buried away in documents. > > Does anyone have any experience of managing to persuade LAs towards > presenting the source information in more usable formats? > > On 16 Jun 2009, at 14:14, CountCulture wrote: > > > 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 > > > --- > Tim Duckett > +44 (0) 7525 786 492 > > > _______________________________________________ > 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
