Tom
[I know you probably know all this but this is what I would say to the
Sheffield Chief Exec]
I had a quick look at the democracy pages on the Sheffield website, and
the main problem is that the pages aren't don't in any way represent the
bodies and relationships between them. So the basic matter of linking
councillors to committees for example, tying meeting minutes to
committees becomes very tricky because those connections aren't there on
the web pages -- in the form of links between them and giving each item
(whether a councillor, committee, meeting or document) an unique,
unchanging id.
Looking at the data, Sheffield seems to be using a general purpose
Content Management System (CMS) called EasySite. I'm not familiar with
this, but often general-purpose CMS's are little more than a collection
of documents (with web-baed editing) that don't reflect the underlying
structure of the information. And that is what is essential in making
the data more open.
I'm no great fan of the main commercial local government CMSs (but
that's a separate email) -- CMIS and Modern.gov -- but they do to a
degree reflect the the underlying nature of the data, and the advantage
for TheyWorkForYouLocal, and similar sites is that if you've written the
code to extract the data from one council using CMIS, for example,
you've pretty much done it for all of them.
In Sheffield's case, it seems that the willingness to share information
is there (for example, the officer decisions section is something many
councils don't have, though they should), but it may mean moving to a
different content management system for the democracy part of the
website (many councils use CMIS/Modern.gov for their democracy data, and
a different system for general services)
Cheers
C
Tom Loosemore wrote:
I met the Chief Exec of Sheffield County Council a few months ago, and
he was super keen on there being a TheyWorkForYou local for Sheff. In
fact, I'm pretty sure that's why he wanted to meet me. He was smart,
and pretty new to the job.
I'd just email him (his name escapes me - after midnight) and tell him
nicely what formatting changes would make life easier.
2009/6/17 Tim Duckett <[email protected]>:
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
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