Come Hack with Us on the City Council Agenda App!

One of the most requested datasets by residents is an accessible programmatic version of the Portland City Council agenda. The City Council agenda is one of the most important records of local City government, and as such, is an obvious choice around which to build a dialog between local City government and residents.

The City of Portland is working to syndicate the Portland City Council agenda each week via an RSS feed. Not only will upcoming agenda items be published, but a much improved archiving solution and changes to the workflow will allow descriptions of each agenda item to remain online well past the "current" week.

The City of Portland seeks to improve opportunities for public comment to gain better insight to issues and the potential impact of those issues on residents. In particular, it is the City's desire to engage with local developers to identify not only the type of interactions required between the City and residents, but also to coordinate and collaborate on the essential feature set needed to capture and display those interactions.

This is a 2 day event. Day 1 begins at OSCON and is targeted to technical and non-technical attendees alike. Day 1 (Friday @OSCON) will include a demo of City of Portland's new legislative agenda app and related API features, followed by an unconference-style discussion of extended features and policies surrounding adding a public commenting capability to the app. Day 2 (Saturday) following OSCON will be an all-day coding fest, hosted at PHPFog headquartered in downtown Portland, focused on building a prototype of the public commenting feature or other apps identified using the City Council agenda data.

Friday, July 29th @ OSCON, Oregon Convention Center, 777 NE Martin Luther King Blvd. Portland, OR 97232

For more information on Day 1, please see: http://www.oscon.com/oscon2011

Saturday, July 30th @ Urban Airship, 334 NW 11th Avenue, Portland, OR 97209

For more information and to register for Day 2, the hackathon, please see: http://apihackdaypdx.eventbrite.com

Please contact @CivicApps to find out more about participating in the event!