Description
Council Data Project (CDP) is an open source project that provides tools for making city council transcripts, legislation, and voting records searchable through a single website. This is achieved through a Python-powered Infrastructure-as-code architecture. CDP provides an entire backend and frontend that can be easily deployed for a governing body of any size or location. As long as the deployer provides data for events in a pre-defined yet flexible structure, CDP provides a database, file storage, speech-to-text transcription, and natural language search.
During this session, we will cover CDP’s backend, primarily focusing on how we created ETL pipelines and an Infrastructure-as-code setup to be as low cost and easily forkable as possible. Because of this, backend-focused developers may get the most out of this talk. Additionally, this session is intended for people of all levels of Python experience. Instead of covering in-depth features or niches of the language itself, we will showcase some neat tools and open-source projects in the Python ecosystem that we use to build our infrastructure!
And this session is especially for anyone interested in civic tech or generally just making democracy more transparent!