Wednesday, December 10

Updates:

E met with Bay area folks to talk about eviction filing data
- Municipal court might have a mailing list, but it's hard to access
- Companies like Lexus nexus simply go to the courthouse and download all court filings
- L: KC Scripts portal shows the names on the eviction case, which we can use to map back to an address, but it's not 100% and relies on finishing the first parts of the data pipeline first
- EB: Managed to make a vis of evictions done by GRE:
Potential for funding: could use for buying eviction data or for funding evictorbook dev work
Postgres database of CCFS data:
- Current text matching (eg. LIKE command) is really fragile, need a better search function
- Options are adding ElasticSearch or more robust postgres search add-ons
Standardization: need better company and address standardization to make parcel -> CCFS mapping more efficient
- From LittleSis on company standardization: " No, there isn't a standard. We have an aliasing feature that allows multiple names, for both persons and orgs, and the deduping feature checks all the aliases to make sure data isn't spread out across multiple entities, but there's not third-party check we do. The assumption is that over time the most common names will filter to the top, rightfully or not. We still have duplicates of course."
Capacities:
- E: 3 weeks of holiday to do a lot of work
- D: 0 capacity for work until new year, then look into courthouse data
- J: mostly free in the afternoons, not evenings
- L: free for next 3 weeks, able to do PM work if paid
- EB: more interested in vis work when unblocked
Next meeting tentatively planned for Wed, 7 January at 12:30.

Action Items: [] D: when back in Seattle, try to get courthouse data [] E: work on adding a better postgres text search [] E/ A: add instructions for accessing postgres [] L: Ask Erin about funding for eviction filings, dev work [] E: Get J access to aemp bay area repo