alt Hacker NewsVery cool! And important for sure, thank you.
Few questions:
- is the stack to index those open source?
- is there some standardized APIs each municipality provides, or do you go through the tedious task of building a per-municipality crawling tool?
- how often do you refresh the data? Checked a city, it has meeting minutes until 6/17, but the official website has more recent minutes (up to 12/2 at least)
Thanks for asking!
- The framework for crawling is open-source. https://github.com/civicband
- There is absolutely not a standardized API for nearly any of this. I build generalized crawlers when I can, and then build custom crawlers when I need.
- Can you let me know which city? The crawlers run for every municipality at least once every day, so that's probably a bug