City platform needs assessment

[krammy19]

Our project should perform a needs assessment of the different government software platforms to determine which sites need which kind of scraping code.

We have a Google Sheet listing which cities are using the 5 main hosting platforms [Legistar, IQM2, NovusAgenda, PrimeGov, Granicus ]

We need an analysis of each of these platforms to answer these basic questions:

• Is meeting data and agendas available in a table format? Can that table be easily dropped into a pandas dataframe?
• How can we access raw text or pdfs for agendas? If agendas are available on dedicated urls, what elements can we search by to access them?
• How can we access raw text or pdfs for staff reports? What search elements do we need for those?
• What is necessary in order to perform customized searches, i.e. date range, committee name, text search? Can searching along these fields be automated?

[xconnieex]

I can take a stab at this

[krammy19]

Awesome! Top priorities should probably be Legistar, IQM2 and Granicus (our AHP parser still needs refinement for NovusAgenda and PrimeGov)

A couple other notes:

• As the Legistar scraper is mostly done, we only need to worry about bullet point Download agenda PDFs #4 for that one.
• Albert Lee (github user: @Monsterblader) also expressed interest in working on this issue.

[xconnieex]

Amy might have made progress on this?