Next Steps
City Scrapers and Documenters
There are important differences between the City Scrapers code and City Bureau’s Documenters program. The code was developed by City Bureau and a team of volunteer coders to solve a problem we see in cities and towns across the country: public meetings for local, county and state government agencies are often spread across dozens of locations, making it difficult for members of the public to access locations, dates and times for these important democratic spaces.
The City Scrapers code is designed to address this issue, as such, it is a precursor to a Documenters program, which requires sustainable funding mechanisms, staff capacity and a mission-oriented approach to civic engagement. If you are interested in partnering with City Bureau on a Documenters program in your area, please begin by establishing operable City Scrapers code. Contact us to learn more.
Publication
- Simple: A Google sheets document with with your scraped meeting information can easily be made public.
- Intermediate: The output of the scrapers can be written to a cloud storage service like AWS S3 or Azure Blob Storage, and then read from a static web app without requiring a persistent web server. This basic events calendar from the City Scrapers project is one example City-Bureau/city-scrapers-events
- Documenters.org: If you’ve used our City Scrapers system, your meetings may be added to Documenters.org free of charge and made available to the public. Contact us to learn more.
Distribution
In addition to local individuals who may be interested in your work, consider reaching out to members of the following groups:
- Community organizations
- Local media outlets
- Municipal and governmental agencies
- Civic technology groups
Contact Us
Was this walkthrough helpful for you? Our team would love to know! Contact us any time at cityscrapers@citybureau.org, and please do let us know if you plan to, or have, built a City Scrapers network for your city.