Obtain/share city council vote data

[woodb]

Local Political Candidates Voting Records

"i'm new to local politics in austin, and it would be interesting to understand candidates positions on issues that are considered to be universal"

“I see how local government is important. I care about some issues. What candidates align with what I care about based on how they vote or what they have said"

Link (more details/brain dump/alpha)

If anyone wants to get their hands dirty with some SIRE scrapping, data munging, and then dumping to Github or some other cheap store, that :arrow_up: would be a good problem to solve for

http://austin.siretechnologies.com/sirepub/item.aspx?itemid=3804 http://austin.siretechnologies.com/sirepub/items.aspx?stype=simple&meetdate=-%20All%20Dates%20-&itemtype=-%20All%20Types%20-

Understanding Voting

Perhaps the tool would allow the user to weight votes based on their assumed issue that they're for (or against) and then weights based on a user's voting issue categories which results in a candidate compatibility metric (or something) based on these data.

Need Data, Interface Ideas

We'll need good data, and some kinda way to match votes with political issues... which may require a list of political issues (?)

[mateoclarke]

@davemcphee built http://austin.minutes.city/

And had a handful of ideas/projects around council issues. https://github.com/open-austin/project-ideas/issues/36 https://github.com/open-austin/project-ideas/issues/45

[davemcphee]

Hi @woodb Brandon! Looks like those "Item" voting records haven't been used in a while, I went back to the start of 2015 and none of the items contain any voting data :(

http://austin.siretechnologies.com/sirepub/item.aspx?itemid=42000

Shame...

[b-g-d]

Hi @woodb , have you thought anymore about this project? I'd love to brainstorm with you, and also do some of the scraping and data munging.

[mscarey]

I just changed the title of this issue to focus on actually getting the data about councilmembers' votes on agenda items. The original commenter was more focused on what we'd do with the data if we had it, but I think the issue of getting the data is relevant here.