biglocalnews / civic-scraper

Tools for downloading agendas, minutes and other documents produced by local government
https://civic-scraper.readthedocs.io
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Suggested Data Model Additions / Questions #147

Open showerst opened 2 years ago

showerst commented 2 years ago

I have a few suggestions on the data model --

Looking at the Asset model:

  1. Are meeting_date and meeting_time supposed to be local, or always UTC? In either case I think adding an optional meeting_tz field would be helpful, otherwise sorting across multiple jurisdictions becomes impossible. FWIW in openstates we landed on enforcing scraped dates to UTC, and including a timezone. This is also helpful in places like Kentucky with multiple timezones.
  2. Adding an optional field for Opencividata division ID would allow this output to be mixed with other projects more easily.

If you're interested in either of these, I'd be willing to drop a PR. I can also potentially contribute some mappings of ocd-ids and timezones, since I know that the biggest hurdle there is mapping all that data.

zstumgoren commented 2 years ago

Hey @showerst Sure, those are both great ideas. Would you mind adding those as optional kwargs? Just want to make sure we have some flexibility going forward, especially with regard to the OCD IDs for bodies that aren't currently reflected in the standard. Thanks!