Deliberation : Online

This week I continued coding on Civitas notably formatting the forum and calendar pages. I'll be pushing that demo to a cloud as soon as I have a feature in place to show markers on the map and search functionality.

I'm struggling with the inclusion of politicians in the search since I don't have a comprehensive resource for county and city elections; I don't know when I'll have to update this information. Likewise, there's a complication in getting data from the myriad of city sites. There is no uniform format to get city council members - I'm considering looking to an open source project (Democracy Map) to get this information but their API does not at this time cover the NW. The alternative is to build my own scrapers, so I'm looking at Python and the Beautiful Soup library to do that. The city sites are all listed on the wa.gov hub, but getting the information out of them is not a trivial task. 

I'm also looking at user-generated schemes to convince politicians to update and maintain their own profiles in the long run. 

I did some consulting this week for Courtney who needs some functionality in her iPad app which wasn't available. I contacted the dev (no go on a mod) and then connected her to some resources for pro bono development.