Constants

This package defines several constants to standardize the values of meeting classifications and status.

Classification

Meeting classifications are used to describe the type of meeting taking place. The Open Civic Data Event specification requires this field but doesn’t specify allowed values. These categories are based off of the meetings we’ve encountered and are an attempt to simplify the information we’re scraping.

For many agencies all of their meetings will have the same classification, but the most common example of needing to use multiple classifications would be boards that hold separate committee meetings. In that case, meetings of the overall board would have the BOARD classification while each committee would be classified with COMMITTEE.

ADVISORY_COMMITTEE

Advisory bodies that typically don’t directly oversee the administration of any governmental functions. Examples would be citizen’s advisory councils or technical advisory committees. These will typically

BOARD

Any board of directors or body that oversees an agency or governmental function. In most cases “Board” will be in the name.

CITY_COUNCIL

Any local government legislative body, also including county-level agencies like the Cook County Board of Commissioners. This is mainly distinguished from the others in that meetings with this classification will consist of elected rather than appointed members.

COMMISSION

Similar to boards, but typically commissions are set up for more focused purposes. Should generally be used if “Commission” is in an agency name.

COMMITTEE

Represents a committee of a BOARD or COMMISSION. This will rarely be used as an agency’s default classification, and in most cases will only be set when the meeting title indicates that a committee will be meeting instead of the full body.

FORUM

Any town hall, feedback session, or other type of meeting where a wide audience of the public is invited outside of a general public comment period. These meetings usually don’t include binding votes.

POLICE_BEAT

Meetings of police beats, only used for police departments.

NOT_CLASSIFIED

Default value for meetings that don’t fit in the other categories. This should almost never be used, including as a default since most agencies will have a default classification that fits better if one can’t clearly be determined for a meeting.

Status

All allowed status values come from the allowed values in the Open Civic Data Event specification. In general, these are set in pipelines to handle logic around cancellation, and CANCELLED is the only one you might need to interact with directly outside of testing.

CANCELLED

Indicates that a particular instance of a meeting has been cancelled. This applies to the initially planned time of a meeting that was rescheduled, because the meeting is no longer occurring at a specific time and the new time will be treated as a separate meeting.

TENTATIVE

An internal status indicating that a meeting is far enough into the future that the details may change.

CONFIRMED

Indicates that a meeting’s details have been confirmed. In our case this is automatically set when the meeting is in the near future.

PASSED

Meetings that have already happened. Will mostly be set automatically.