OKCouncillor is a data scraper, API, and civic engagement app for the City of Toronto. The scraper pulls data from the City of Toronto council meetings and parses it into a database, the API serves the data up as JSON, and the app allows people to discover how their Councillor matches with their political leanings.
Live Site: OK Councillr
- PostgreSQL
- Ruby 2.2.2
- Rails 4.2.0
Clone the project
git clone git@github.com:CivicHaxx/ok_councillr.git
cd
into the project directory and run bundle install
.
Run rake db:setup
to download the City Council Agenda and votes from December 2014 to today's date and seed the database. The project currently contains a mix of real and fake data, as the scraper is continually a work in progress.
We'd love to see what others can do with this project. If you'd like to contribute to this project, please fork the repo and create a pull request of your changes.
- Crowd-sourced synopses on each agenda item to make them more legible to the every-day person.
- Facebook OAuth so that we can do more interesting analyses of users' responses and get normalized data back from our application.
- A more robust scraper that also grabs motions from the City Council Minutes and connects these to City Councillor Votes in the database.
- Further data analysis on the Councillor Profile pages to show:
- % of match between the user and the Councillor.
- Top 5 most similar and dissimilar Councillors to each Councillor.
- This is an expansion of Matt Elliot's Ford Nation Percentile.
This project was created by @emilyjfan, @ScottKbka, and @SpiritBreaker226.
OKCouncillr includes code from @jteneycke who gave us a head start on the data scrapers, @epitron who wrote htmlstrip
for cleaning up the agenda documents from the city, and @csaunders who helped with refactoring the scraper and adding a MarkDown parser to clean up the front end.