City Hall Monitor

Chicago City Council publishes thousands of records a year, and most of them are routine: permits, sidewalk cafés, awnings, congratulations. City Hall Monitor was a searchable index of all of them, built at the Knight Lab in 2015 and 2016 so that a reporter could find the few that are news.

Council matters and their attachments were pulled from the council's Legistar system. Each document went to DocumentCloud for its text and page images, and PostgreSQL full-text search indexed the result, weighted toward titles and sponsors. A search could be limited to the last thirty days, the past year, or all time, and a subscription saved a search and sent an email when a new document matched it.

Ignore the boring stuff

A checkbox, on by default, excluded the routine categories: congratulations, gratitude, and recognitions; sign permits; sidewalk cafés, canopies, and awnings; parking permits; condominium claims; sewer refunds; oaths of office. Turning it off brought them back.

A glossary grouped the records into the categories an investigator works in: claims, developments, exemptions, licenses, parking, permits, proceedings, public use, recognition, services and budgets, tax, and traffic, each with example titles.

I built it with Joe Germuska and Jennifer Wilson, with Heather Billings on the interface. Student fellows Bomani McClendon, Michael Martinez, and Benjamin Din contributed to the project.

Built with

Django and PostgreSQL, DocumentCloud, and the Legistar web API.

Smart search for city documents

Ignore the boring stuff

Built with