Austin City Council Agendas Become Open Data

Beginning in January 2016, the Austin City Council has been publishing the agenda items from its weekly meetings on the city data portal at data.austintexas.gov, in a structured format with computer-readable dates, meeting types, and other details. This new resource was a much-appreciated response to several Open Austin project teams who were interested in creating new ways for residents to learn about the city council’s activities, but who discovered that data collection involved a prohibitively difficult process of scraping text from PDF files stored in a confusing directory structure.

After an attempt in 2015 to create an agenda item notification system called ATX Council Connect had to be abandoned at the prototype phase, Open Austin members made it a priority in our 2016 Advocacy Agenda to ask the city to release data about the council’s activities in a more useable format. Mateo Clarke and Shellee O’Brien, a leader of the original Council Connect project, used the city’s interest in soliciting bids for a new agenda management system as an opportunity to draft a new position paper and bring it to the city, asking the city to treat the agendas as a public resource, and to make them reuseable and accessible in bulk.

Right now there are at least two teams within Open Austin interested in finding uses for the new city council data: one project to geocode agenda items and display them on a Google map for an easy overview, and another project to integrate the agendas dataset with the city’s separate lobbyist and campaign finance datasets. When the city chose the solution of publishing the agenda items on data.austintexas.gov, these teams were thrilled and energized to find out they were going to be saved the effort of scraping and parsing the text themselves.

If you want to get involved, you can join the discussion on Open Austin’s Slack board, and if you have a new idea about how to use the city council’s data, you can share it on our Ideas page on GitHub.