Australian Local Councillors Popolo

This repo contains JSON data in the Popolo open government data specification for elected councillors at local governments in Australia.

The data is generated using a fork of the CSV to Popolo converter which was originally created for EveryPolitician.

The data has been collected by scrapers hosted on morph.io. It has been exported from morph.io in CSV format and imported into a Google Spreadsheet to be cleaned up and updated.

Updates

To update or add to this data follow these steps:

1. Make your changes in the Google Spreadsheet.
2. If you don’t feel comfortable with the following steps, simply open a new issue to let us know you’ve made changes to the spreadsheet, e.g. “Snowy River Councillors waiting in the spreadsheet”.
3. Run bundle to install the Gem dependencies.
4. Run bundle exec rake to pull data from the Spreadsheet into JSON files in this repository.
5. Inspect the diff to verify the changes to the JSON files and check for errors before committing them.
6. Submit a pull request with your changes with an explanation of what they are and why you have made them.

Tips for collecting councillor information

The best place to find information about local councillors is the council’s official website. Most council websites have a page listing all the councillors and their information. Wikipedia can be a good source of information about the councillors’ political party, if it’s not on the council website.

The minimum information we need is the councillor’s email. Next important is the url for an image of them. Next important is their political party. The source of where you got most of the information is also important so we can go back and update or fill in details in the future. Any other information you can collect that has a collumn in the spreadsheet is wonderfut—but if you’re in a hurry just grab what’s necessary.

Remove titles, prefixes and memberships from names, such as “Dr” or “OAM”. For example “Dr Louise Hill OAM” should be listed as “Louise Hill”.

Scrapers for the original raw data

We used the following web scrapers hosted on morph.io to collect a lot of raw data to start this collection. We don’t recommend rerunning these and merging their output into the Google sheet. If you do this, then generate the JSON and try to merge the changes in here, the diff will be extremely hard to read. This makes checking the data very difficult. It’s preferable to update the councillors one-by-one, unless you can come up with a way to produce useful git diffs, or split the results into individual Pull Requests for the changes to each authority’s councillors.

• South Australian Councillors https://morph.io/equivalentideas/sa_lg_councillors
• NSW Councillors https://morph.io/equivalentideas/nsw_lg_directory_councillors
• Victorian Councillors https://morph.io/equivalentideas/vic_lg_directory_councillors
• Queensland Councillors https://morph.io/openaustralia/qld_lg_directory_councillors
• Tasmania https://morph.io/openaustralia/tas_lg_directory_councillors
• Western Australia https://morph.io/openaustralia/west_australian_local_councillors