[Omaha.pm] Mon Jun 29 7pm - PRI Hack Night!

[Jay Hannah]

http://www.meetup.com/Open-Nebraska-Meetup/events/223501025/

Jack Dunn could use some developer help refreshing an Omaha City Council database with recent Tax Increment Financing (TIF) data. 

Let's get together and get this done! :D See you there!

- Jay Hannah 
402-598-7782

http://www.meetup.com/Open-Nebraska-Meetup/events/223501025/





> On Jun 19, 2015, at 1:44 AM, Jack Dunn <office at prineb.org> wrote:
> 
> All,
> 
> The objective of this project is to update two PRI reports on Tax Increment Financing (TIF).  These two reports, which can be found on the Policy Research & Innovation website (www.prineb.org), cover TIF projects for the City of Omaha for the years 2008 through 2011.  I would like to update these reports with data from 2012 through 2014.
> 
> The source data are located in the Archived City Council Journals, which are the minutes of past City Council meetings.  The Journals are PDFs.  I have no interest in the City Council Agendas for this project.
> 
> The Journals for 2014 are found at: 
>     http://www.cityofomaha.org/cityclerk/city-council/journals-a-videos
> Prior Journals are found at:
>     http://www.cityofomaha.org/cityclerk/archived-city-council-documents
> 
> The variables of interest are found in two spreadsheet from a 2011 PRI report:
>     http://www.progressiveresearchinstitute.org/Papers/2011/TIF/revenue_lost.pdf
>     http://www.progressiveresearchinstitute.org/Papers/2011/TIF/ctl_project_name-project_date.pdf
> 
> Both spreadsheets are cited in that 2011 TIF report titled:  What is Tax Increment Financing (and Why Should Anyone Care)? 
>     http://www.prineb.org/Papers/2011/TIF/tif_white_paper2.pdf
> 
> A second, follow up report was published in 2012:
>     http://www.prineb.org/Papers/2012/TIFReportUpdateFinal.pdf
> 
> It would be a great help just to go through the Journals from 2012 through 2014 and capture the TIF ordinance description and attached files.  If there is a way to capture the variables of interest mentioned above for each proposed TIF ordinance, even better!
> 
> There's more that I would like to propose;  for instance, tracking the real estate, banking and construction connections including campaign contributions for City Council members, but let's take one project at a time.
> 
> I'm sure I have left questions unanswered, so please let me know what they are and I'll do my best to respond.
> 
>     Thank you,
> 
>     Jack Dunn
>     Co-Executive Director
>     Policy Research & Innovation
> 
> 
> On 06/18/2015 10:51 PM, Matt Steele wrote:
>> The agendas website is back up and running. Looks like the ElasticSearch service had crashed; it's back up now.
>> 
>> There's not much to the page. A perl script scrapes the site Nate linked, and we convert the PDFs to text (using pdf2text) and place them in a search engine (ElasticSearch) with a web frontend. Still kicking around after 3 years.
>> 
>> On Jun 18, 2015 9:45 PM, "Nate Benes" <natebenes at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Jay, Jack,
>> 
>> http://www.cityofomaha.org/cityclerk/city-council/agendas is the canonical source for these agendas.
>> 
>> During the first Hack Omaha, a team put together a service that automatically downloaded these from the city's website and added them to a simple, searchable web interface.  There's a demo live at http://agendas.dataomaha.com/                 although it seems broken right now.
>> 
>> I bcc'd the original author of that project to see if he knows the current status.
>> 
>> Jack, how would you like to see the agendas presented?  What would a user hope to learn from agendas and how can we best get them that information?
>> 
>> Thanks,
>> Nate
>> 
>> On Thu, Jun 18, 2015 at 4:27 PM Jay Hannah <jay at jays.net> wrote:
>> On Jun 16, 2015, at 2:32 PM, Jack Dunn <office at prineb.org> wrote:
>> > https://github.com/modi1231/ParseCityCouncilToDB
>> 
>> Hi Jack,
>> 
>> So it looks like what you've got there is a pretty simple text parser which then shoves the text into a database. Looks like it's written in C# 4.0.
>> 
>> I suspect that the Omaha City Council documents are PDFs, so the actual data flow is:
>> 
>> download .pdf from somewhere
>>   -> convert .pdf to text
>>   -> parse the text, put it in a database
>>   -> ??? website?
>> 
>> Do you know where the original data source is?
>> 
>> Is it just these agendas?
>> 
>>   http://www.cityofomaha.org/cityclerk/city-council/agendas
>> 
>> The other data that you mentioned -- do you have that data somewhere? Is it all .pdf files?
>> 
>> Thanks,
>> 
>> j
>> 
>> 
>> 
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