City Scrapers: Open Coding Session

City Bureau is a nonprofit civic journalism lab based on the South Side of Chicago. We bring journalists and communities together in a collaborative spirit to produce equitable media coverage and encourage civic participation.

City Bureau

Public meetings are important spaces for democracy where any resident can participate in civic life and hold public figures accountable. But how does the public know when meetings are happening? It isn’t easy! These events are spread across dozens of websites, rarely in useful data formats.
That’s why we're working with a team of civic coders to develop and coordinate the <A HREF="https://www.citybureau.org/city-scrapers" TARGET="_blank" DATA-MSYS-CLICKTRACK="0" REL="nofollow noopener noreferrer">City Scrapers</A>, a community open source project designed to standardize, scrape and share these meetings in a central database, in collaboration with <A HREF="https://www.citybureau.org/documenters" TARGET="_blank" DATA-MSYS-CLICKTRACK="0" REL="nofollow noopener noreferrer">City Bureau's Documenters program</A>.
What can you learn from working on the City Scrapers project?
A lot about cities! What is Chicago's City Council talking about this week? What are Local School Councils, and what community power do they have? What neighborhood is the police department doing outreach in? Who governs our water?
From building a scraper, you'll gain experience with:
<UL>
<LI>how the web works (HTTP requests and responses, reading HTML)</LI>
<LI>writing functions and tests in Python</LI>
<LI>version control and collaborative coding (git and Github)</LI>
<LI>a basic data file format (json), working with a schema and data validation</LI>
<LI>problem solving, finding patterns, designing robust code</LI>
</UL>
RSVP to join our next Open Coding Session.

DePaul University

Our {communityGuidelinesLink} describe the sort of content we prohibit on Eventbrite. If you suspect an event may be in violation, you can report it to us so we can investigate.

To report other categories of prohibited or illegal content, submit {link}

City Scrapers: Open Coding Session

More events from City Bureau

Follow organizers to get events picked for you

Still looking for the right event?

Explore all events in Chicago and filter by date, category, and more to find the perfect fit.

City Scrapers: Open Coding Session

More events from City Bureau

Follow organizers to get events picked for you

You might also like...

Sign-In for personalized recommendations

Still looking for the right event?

Explore all events in Chicago and filter by date, category, and more to find the perfect fit.