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City-Bureau / city-scrapers

Scrape, standardize and share public meetings from local government websites
https://cityscrapers.org
MIT License
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How to represent that a meeting will be accessible online in the event schema ? #971

Open skorasaurus opened 4 years ago

skorasaurus commented 4 years ago

Hi,

In a conversation that I had with @lcaswell - we remarked that several of the upcoming meetings on the Documenters calendars didn't include any information of whether a meeting will be have remote access (Zoom link/facebook live/webex)

Should that be something that is included in the event schema? If so, has there been talk of that?

Looking at the Open civic data event schema (which the event for the city-scrapers was modeled after; not sure how close you want to stick to that); they don't have an explicit field; but perhaps it could be used for the links as well as a standard title for it ?

Interested to hear your thoughts and what you've done in Chicago so far.

pjsier commented 4 years ago

Good question! Right now we've been putting those details in the description primarily, since a lot of the time the information we're getting is inconsistent. There are a lot of agencies that say "Virtual meeting" with no additional details or "Zoom", but that you need to reach out to them for the login, so we've just been trying to include that wherever we can find it.

We're using OCD pretty directly for the output (we have a Scrapy pipeline for it in the core repo), but because that's a pipeline we've got more flexibility in how we represent info in the Meeting items. In a few cases where additional info has been helpful we've been adding namespaced keys in the extras field, which is allowed for any of the OCD data types, but not mentioned explicitly around events. Also just now realizing we're including that as "extra" instead of "extras" so I'll fix that.

A standard title for links could be interesting, and that's something we tried out for a while for the source field before deciding on using OCD consistently, but it might be a bit limiting for cases where we know it's remote but the info isn't included or it's just a dial-in.

It seems like more agencies have settled into our weird new normal, and I imagine some of them could stay remote for a while, do you think a boolean remote flag could be useful? It could also be remote_access to clarify that it doesn't just apply to meetings that are only remote.