Code for San Jose's Agenda Scraper is an open-source tool to parse through publicly available agendas and staff reports to provide a centralized repository of local government actions. Our goal is help community members learn about what their local government is actively discussing and focusing on.
'Wait a second,' you might be thinking. 'Aren't all government meetings and agendas already posted to local city websites?'
You're absolutely correct! Cities do a good job following the letter of the law in publishing all required documents to their websites. But the problem is they don't necessarily follow the spirit of the law. Local government documents are quite boring and hard to parse, and there's a lack of effort to boil down complex issues for the public to understand.
Scraping the city's document archives is a first step for us to work on analyzing these documents and provide better public notification.