Council Data Project: Software for Municipal Data Collection, Analysis, and Publication
Eva Maxfield Brown, To Huynh, Isaac Na, Brian Ledbetter, Hawk Ticehurst, Sarah Liu, Emily Gilles, Katlyn M. F. Greene, Sung Cho, Shak Ragoler, Nicholas Weber · The Journal of Open Source Software · 2021
Cities, counties, and states throughout the USA are bound by law to archive recordings of public meetings.Most local governments comply with these laws by posting documents, audio, or video recordings online.As there is no set standard for municipal data archives however, parsing and processing such data is typically time consuming and highly dependent on each municipality.Council Data Project (CDP) is a set of open-source tools that improve the accessibility of local government data by systematically collecting, transforming, and re-publishing this data to the web.The data re-published by CDP is packaged and presented within a searchable web application that vastly simplifies the process of finding specific information within the archived data.We envision this project being used by a variety of groups including civic technologists hoping to promote government transparency, researchers focused on public policy, natural language processing, machine learning, or information retrieval and discovery, and many others.