municipal council/mayor campaign finances

[Thomas Lord]

I had a fun weekend plus a couple of days building a data set of
campaign finance information for City Council and Mayoral races in
Berkeley, CA.

Some of the data is on display here:

http://basiscraft.com/-/2012/10/15/widget/index.html

It was an interesting exercise.

Candidates are encouraged but not required to file this data
electronically. Some still submit paper forms that I had to enter by
hand.

The City of Berkeley makes some effort to export the e-filed data as
spreadsheets -- but that feature of their web site doesn't work
reliably. We wound up doing some pretty Unholy Hacks to
semi-automagically scrape data from PDFs (and not PDFs with form data --
that would have been too easy).

One hope is that by meeting the city half-way on their well-intended but
problematic open government efforts, we can gain some influence over the
city's future IT directions.

(Hat tip to Maplight's Voters Edge for the inspiration.)

-t