Best Practices on Public Meeting Information for Municipal Departments

[diaholliday]

How can city/county/state departments best display and disseminate information on public meetings in a way that is more accessible and/or compatible with our scrapers? This could be based on formatting best practices (how to share the most critical information to share), methods to improve export (RSS feeds, etc) and/or tips on how to contact appropriate municipal departments of technology.

This is a non-coding research task that could result in a report that can be shared internally or directly with city officials.

Good places to begin research:

• Campaign websites (especially for clerk offices) that promise to modernize access to open data
• Interviews with tech professionals and companies that develop tools to enhance governmental transparency (i.e. DataMade, Department of Technology employees)
• Overview of web feeds that allow users to access updates to online content in a standardized, computer-readable format
• What are all the ways government agencies and individual representatives publish/post information on meetings?

If you're interested in this issue, please contact Darryl via Github, Slack or email.

[diaholliday]

Adding a running doc to streamline this process. Feel free to add/edit directly to the doc if you'd like to contribute to this research process: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1JpeHVw0H6ghRi3EkvqRa3sDAXkfc_goP33CAtdFPEbA/edit