Thought for Food

Open Minneapolis

The Sunlight Foundation reports:

Tired of waiting for your city to become more transparent? Tony Webster, John Schrom and Ryan Johnson decided to take responsibility for their city of Minneapolis and create a software platform in order to “open municipal government, encourage clean and information-based elections, track issues and inspire community engagement and public participation.” Their new project is called Open Minneapolis. […]

While all the goals of Open Minneapolis are important to me as a journalist and a citizen one is particularly catching my eye: the implementation of a standardized XML format for public meetings.

Municipal meetings are difficult enough to sit through in person. Waiting to mine a PDF release for the data you need is even worse. With the implementation of an XML format for public meetings analysis of this data will become a breeze.