Tenth hacknight – 18 participants.
Presenter: Connie Leung (@HalloConnie)
Breakout groups:
- Scraping orders-in-council – Alex
- Toronto Budget accessibility – Henrik
- Affordable Housing data – Bianca
- Measuring civic engagement by looking at voter turnout – Ushnish
Thanks again to ThoughtWorks for dinner!
Tonight, a few of us met to discuss the federal orders-in-council database.[1]
There was a recent iPolitics piece by Liz Thompson that revealed the power of just taking a super basic analytical look at the data as a whole, instead of the piecemeal approach suggested by the website.[2] She generated national discussion on her findings.[3][4]
So, we’re trying to scrape it first, then afterwards considering doing some named-entity recognition/other NLP methods on the data.
[1] http://www.pco-bcp.gc.ca/oic-ddc.asp?lang=eng&Page=secretariats
[2] http://ipolitics.ca/2015/09/02/two-dozen-secret-cabinet-decisions-hidden-from-parliament-canadians/
[3] http://ipolitics.ca/2015/09/03/secret-orders-in-council-need-more-oversight-may/
[4] http://ipolitics.ca/2015/09/04/an-ndp-government-would-review-secret-oics-boivin/
Workgroup: Toronto Budget Project
Participants: Henrik Bechmann, Medina Abdelkader, Matthew Gray
Two items came were discussed:
1. A messaging feature of the toronto budget website portal, which would provide a facility for users to subscribe to topical information streams (eg. bicycles), which would provide notifications of new related information. Could for example tap into the query capability of tabstoronto.com, and combine links to related background information on the portal.
2. A way to add stakeholder input into the planning mix. Main stakeholders are Civil Society Organizations (CSOs), Neighbourhood Groups, Frontline Workers, and Individual Citizens. The plan is to create a proposal for the Better Budget people to organize stakeholder input, both to provide short terms priorities for the Civic Tech Toronto Budget Project, and ongoing guidance during any development process. The means to get this feedback could include an email survey initially, followed by a consultation meeting using strategic planning tools.
Next meeting will be dedicated to producing a proposal for Better Budget people. Medina and Matthew to take the lead on this.