Jurisdiction Scraper

• Located in lametro/__init__.py
• Creates jurisdiction, organization, and posts
  • Specifically, creates organizations that are not coded as the board itself or a committee in the Legistar API, as bodies meeting these parameters are created in the people scraper
• Creates legislative sessions

Core concepts

Division

• Political geography
• “Jurisdictions exist within a division, while Posts can represent a division”
• Divisions relevant to LA Metro:
  • City of Los Angeles
  • Los Angeles County supervisorial districts
  • Statutorially defined transit sectors
  • Caltrans (Calfornia Department of Transportation) District
• Further reading: https://open-civic-data.readthedocs.io/en/latest/proposals/0002.html

Jurisdiction

• Logical unit of governance
• Example: LA Metro
• Further reading: https://open-civic-data.readthedocs.io/en/latest/proposals/0003.html

Post

• Position in organization
• Posts define the core positions within an organization, and can optionally be associated with a Division, i.e., the political geography they represent
• Examples:
  • Post associated with a division: Appointee of the Mayor of the City of Los Angeles on the Board of Directors representing the City of Los Angeles
  • Post not associated with a division: Chair of the Board of Directors
• Further reading: https://open-civic-data.readthedocs.io/en/latest/proposals/0005.html

Membership

• “A relationship between a Person and an Organization, possibly including a Post”
  • Committee Memberships are not associated with a Post because committees do not have a defined membership structure
• Memberships are created by the people scraper
• Further reading: https://open-civic-data.readthedocs.io/en/latest/proposals/0005.html

Key issues

• Legislative sessions must be added manually every June. The scraper breaks if they are not added before legislation is created in the new session.
  • Write a self-sufficient method for detecting LA Metro legislative session
  • Update legislative session automatically