This is a read only archive of pad.okfn.org. See the shutdown announcement for details.

• Theme 1: Use cases & needs - How are you using decision making data currently or what kind of ideas you have?
• Theme 2: Proliferation - How can we promote the adoption of existing good API standard?

• Notes will be put to the etherpad [all facilitators]
• After  the session we will write a blog post and send it out to  different  lists (OKFN -lists, Sunlight, My Society, Open parliament list  (150+  parliament monitoring orgs), etc.) in order to gather feedback  from  wider audience -> see. line 130 [Scott&James will write]
• Skype Call in the beginning of September [Jogi&Petteri will invite]

•      - It is difficult to understanding the sort of decisions and perspectives a politician has, without knowing which processes they've been involved in and how they've voted. 
• - It could be possible to learn from the history of decisions made, and the effects they've had. If, in addition to meta descriptions of the processes, documents describing the sureveys, research guiding a decision, as well as surveys of the impact of policies, could be linked, it would help researchers and citizens draw knowledge from policy decisions. For example, one could review similar historical policy decisions, to guide current decisions. 

• stories from other standards (good and bad examples)
• who are the key players
• what is target audience (cities, civic hackers...)
• how the specification should be governed

• Need to collect good use cases and demonstrate value early on in the process ; it could be valuable to really measure how much money and time is going to be saved in this process and indicate clearly the increased quality of life by simple examples. The Helsinki and Jyväskylä experiences can be surveyd early autumn.
• Who are the key players? Need to have the right partners and support groups to give the project legitimacy.
• Getting governments to participate in the process of developing this API or standard
• Maybe make it a core API that can then be changed by the partners? Holistic adoption is likely unrealistic 
• Find a way to translate the differences between different data standards – this would be a good way to avoid competing standards 
• Define carrots and sticks for adoption. The open decisions API standards adoption may become a funding criteria in the EU28. Who should be lobbied?
• The German http://oparl.org/ developers have shown initial interest to jump on board. Other mentioned potential early adopters could be Chicago, Philadelphia, Jakarta, and Zaragoza. The standard can be marketed widely when three cities from three differend countries have adopted the standard.
• The group is going to continnue active work in autumn 2014.

• City SDK ( http://www.citysdk.eu/ ) experience: first APIs harmozized and implemented in a project in 8 cities and then spreading to more places
• It is difficult to get a city to adopt anything
• the base systems are not capable to provide data in good format -> Get the system vendors on board (can be asked / surveyed which vendors systems cities use)
• Culture problem in governmental bodies, old fashioned etc. -> Find one person in the council pushing things forward
• Are the cities co-operating - are there existing national networks?
• Well cocumented and useful standards get used - No fancy marketing needed
• Identify first mover organization in each country - who would be closest to do this in your country?
• Mapping the existing work
• Research existing data specifications/standards, research use cases, and tie  the  existing work together into a common schema
• maybe existing linked data ontology
• some XML standard to annotate legal documents
• people don't know abot local projects / applications because they are done in local languages
• For the trustworthines it is important to know how the standard is governed, how it will evolve, who can suggest changes and how
• How the opencividata and popolo -projects are governt? -> OCD similar to Python project http://opencivicdata.readthedocs.org/en/latest/proposals/0001.html and Popolo email list on w3c
• internationally would be important to recognize the main players (only  tech standard setting side or also international associations of local  govs etc.)
• only legislative standard that has been widely adopted by legislative bodies is the Akoma Ntoso XML format
• API should support multilingual documents

• The    differences are mostly superficial (for example cities, states,    counties etc.), all the data deals people, organizations and topics    (decisions)
• Differences between nations might be bigger
• Scope the effort by define "decision making data" - it may not be possible or ideal to try to fit all under the same API
• Small common core + optional parts of API
• It is possible to create a standard that can be used in part (fx. only for voting data or only for meeting agandas)
• 
  

• Which stakeholders should we involve in this early stage? Who is interested - open call

• idea: cross project hackathon - let developers get to know the other similar projects and share knowledge

• search for bigger funding for surveying the current status of the cities for example

• Who are behind the project
• Team is part of Sunlight Foundation
• The project is funded by google.org
• At the moment no politicians involved or supporting, but some civil cervants do support
• First cities to be approached
• NY and Chicago
• Kansas City
• Also collaboration with the Canadians and Chileans

• http://popoloproject.com/

• Don't try to build everything at once. Start with smaller pieces, the way Poplus has done with its "components" strategy, one component at a time:  http://poplus.org/catalogue.html

• http://dev.hel.fi/apis/openahjo/
• OpenAhjo is an API and a UI for accessing the decision-making material of the City of Helsinki.

• Projects seeking funding, whose progress has therefore been limited:
• Matt MacDonald has been working on this for http://www.nearbyfyi.com/ The blog has many relevant posts.
• See also their Knight News Challenge submission: http://opengov.newschallenge.org/open/open-government/submission/a-network-of-regionalized-online-services-for-cities-and-towns/
• OpenPlans (creators of Open311) have also done work around meetings, see http://openplans.org/2013/03/we-want-to-make-meetings-matter/ and http://opengov.newschallenge.org/open/open-government/submission/making-meetings-matter/
• Jerry Hall has been working on http://ecitizens.org/ and can point you to tons of other work on this subject - and, yes, there is yet another Knight News Challenge submission: http://opengov.newschallenge.org/open/open-government/submission/are-you-an-ecitizen-laying-a-foundation-for-better-citizen-government-communications/
• Outside  these initiatives, which have a greater or lesser focus on   standardization, there's of course all the major software vendors to   governments for creating and editing agendas and minutes. Granicus is   the biggest in the US, and their Legistar API makes these documents  available in machine-readable formats. They are possibly the most open  to working with the open government community.
• Sunlight's http://openstates.org/ and http://opencivicdata.org/ include support for agenda data.
• in Germany since early 2013 there is a voluntary effort to develop a  specification for such an API called „OParl - Initiative for  standardization of open  access to parliamentary information systems in  Germany.“ Involved are  civil society organizations, some German cities  and their public IT  service providers as well as German makers of  parliamentary/council  information systems. (Marian Steinbach initially  came up with the initiative)
• You can find more information in German here: http://oparl.de
• Google Translation: http://translate.google.de/translate?hl=de&sl=de&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Foparl.de%2F
• The current status of the specification is available on GitHub: https://github.com/OParl/specs
• Note that OParl is considering adopting more of http://popoloproject.com/ whose scope is international, not just Germany
• For meeting minutes, there are a few initiatives I'm  aware of, but I  don't  know that they're widely supported yet. Akoma  Ntoso has a  "debate  record" document type. And I know that MySociety's  components  strategy  envisions a "SayIt" hansard system, though I'm  unsure of its  current  status.
•  FYI,   SayIt is  progressing nicely - I saw a demo earlier this fall, and  it   can import  speeches in Akoma Ntoso format. Code is at https://github.com/mysociety/sayit
• Sunlight's   own debate analysis site is Capitol Words, but it doesn't yet offer   much in the way of data  format guidance. We're likely to be taking a   closer look at the site in  the new year, though. For now, I'd say that   James M.'s pointer toward  Granicus is an excellent suggestion.
• OpenCivicData's Event schema (which can be used for meetings with agendas) can be found here: https://github.com/opencivicdata/pupa/blob/master/pupa/models/schemas/event.py
• Minutes   vary greatly from one jurisdiction to the next. Some are closer to   transcripts (Tom Lee mentions several relevant projects), while others   look a lot like agendas with more details filled in, e.g. vote  outcomes. 
• The   super-class to agendas, minutes, transcripts, etc. would be  "documents"  - I've collected some of the existing standards/projects at  https://github.com/opennorth/popolo-spec/issues/13 some of which are more relevant to agendas and minutes.
• http://www.openingparliament.org/
• http://api.okf.fi/console/, which is following google places api with Point Of Interests, addresses and road vectors (In Finnish: https://trello.com/c/JqBdRy47/28-avoin-osoitetietopalvelu-jalostusalgoritmit-ja-jalostettu-avoin-data )

1. Mapping existing work / resources -> If you know more related initiatives add links to comments and tweet with  #opencivicdata - let's link to this pad and keep the resource master list for a moment here
2. Join the deeper discussion in one of the listed forums
3. Invitation to join the Skype in September?