Kathryn Darnall from CoA's Campaign Finance Database Initiative
Description:
On August 6, 2015 the Austin City Council unanimously approved an amendment (https://www.municode.com/library/tx/austin/codes/code_of_ordinances?nodeId=TIT2AD_CH2-2CAFI_ART3DIFIPRCOEXRE_S2-2-26FICAFIREDA) to the City Code related to electronic filing of campaign finance information. Filers who are obligated to file a campaign finance report are also required to submit a structured data file containing the contents of the campaign finance report. These data files are published to the City's Open Data Portal (https://data.austintexas.gov/). Kathryn will walk us through how her team worked to make this data publicly accessible, searchable, and downloadable, created infrastructure to ensure timely and trustworthy data, all while leveraging existing tools and resources.
