Public meetings are important spaces for democracy where any resident can participate and hold public figures accountable. City Bureau's Documenters program pays community members an hourly wage to inform and engage their communities by attending and documenting public meetings.
How does the Documenters program know when meetings are happening? It isn’t easy! These events are spread across dozens of websites, rarely in useful data formats.
That’s why City Bureau and ProPublica Illinois is working together with a team of civic coders to develop and coordinate a community open source project to scrape and store these meetings in a central Documenters calendar.
The Documenters-Aggregator is a collection of web-scrapers and utilities to create a comprehensive and accessible database of public government meetings in Chicago and Cook County.
The City Bureau Labs community welcomes contributions from everyone. We prioritize the coding experiences of under-represented groups in tech and media.
This project provides an opportunity for coders and journalists to build up their technical skills so that they can become leaders and mentors in Chicago’s civic tech and media scene. We hope that working with us will fill experience gaps (like using git/github, working with data, or having your ideas taken seriously), so that more under-represented folks will become contributors and decision-makers in both City Bureau’s tech community and Chicago’s civic tech scene at large. We encourage folks who have found their grounding with us to continue transforming our communities in collaboration with community partners.
- Fill out this form to join our slack channel and meet the community.
- Read about how we collaborate and review our Code of Conduct.
- Get started with Installation and Contributing a spider.
We ask all new contributors to start by writing a spider and its documentation or fixing a bug in an existing one in order to gain familiarity with our code and culture. Reach out on slack for support if you need it. We also meet up in person to work together regularly, and post about upcoming meetups in slack.
For those familiar with the project, please see the help-wanted Github issues.
This project is organized and maintained by City Bureau and ProPublica Illinois.