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pgh-public-meetings / city-scrapers-pitt

Pittsburgh City Scrapers: sourcing public meetings in Pittsburgh
https://pgh-public-meetings.github.io/events/
MIT License
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Add new flag for virtual status #197

Open bonfirefan opened 3 years ago

bonfirefan commented 3 years ago

Mirroring the issues brought up in the main City Scrapers, we are thinking that we can add a field indicating whether the meeting is virtual, in-person, or both.

Text from the City Scrapers (Chicago) issue:

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.

bonfirefan commented 3 years ago

Would mean that we alter the "Meeting" object to include a new access_options to include three values: "ONSITE", "VIRTUAL", "BOTH"

maxachis commented 3 years ago

One thing that @wsnavely brought up is that, if we add access_options, we'd likely need to update the frontend UI as well.

maxachis commented 3 years ago

One workaround would be to modify the status to say "VIRTUAL" or "VIRTUAL-ONLY" or something like that.