DOI: 10.7910/dvn/njtbem
title: LocalView Public Meetings Database

description: &lt;h3&gt;LocalView is a database co-created by &lt;a href:"mailto:sbarari@g.harvard.edu"&gt;Soubhik Barari&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href="mailto:tsimko@g.harvard.edu"&gt;Tyler Simko&lt;/a&gt; to advance the study of local government in the United States.&lt;/h3&gt;&lt;br&gt;

It is the &lt;i&gt;largest existing dataset of local government public meetings&lt;/i&gt;— the central policy-making process in American local government — as they are captured on video. &lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;

To get started, select the file(s) that you'd like for your use case based on the year that the meeting took place. Note: we are no longer supporting file formats other than &lt;code&gt;.parquet&lt;/code&gt; for space considerations. &lt;br&gt;&lt;br&gt;

For potential use cases or further guidance on downloading the data in bulk, visit the companion website: &lt;a href="https://localview.net"&gt;localview.net&lt;/a&gt;.

&lt;h1&gt;Change Log&lt;/h1&gt;
&lt;p&gt;Scraping, parsing, identifying, and merging together meetings
involves a large number of non-trivial decisions, many of which need to
be adjusted over time particularly as the YouTube API changes.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;As such, when such decisions notably deviate from process or the
outputs documented in the &lt;a href="https://soubhikbarari.com/writings/localview.pdf"&gt;first version of
this database&lt;/a&gt;, it will be logged here.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;div id="version-2.0-2023-10" class="section level2"&gt;
&lt;h2&gt;Version 2.0 (2023-10)&lt;/h2&gt;
&lt;ul&gt;
&lt;li&gt;Data updated up until September 2023.
&lt;ul&gt;
&lt;li&gt;~10,000 new videos added, all belonging to existing channels in
database.&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;Change in data format:
&lt;ul&gt;
&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;channelType&lt;/code&gt; column changed to
&lt;code&gt;channel_type&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;ST_FIPS&lt;/code&gt; correctly padded to be 7 characters (2 digit
state code + 5 digit place FIPS code).&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;videos with no caption available from YouTube are explicitly marked
as “&lt;No caption available&gt;” in &lt;code&gt;caption_text&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;caption_text_cleaned&lt;/code&gt; is actually consistently cleaned
(previously stray timestamps/pause markers in some entries).&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;acs_2018_*&lt;/code&gt; columns now prefixed as
&lt;code&gt;acs_18&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;additional ACS variables now available for each place:
&lt;ul&gt;
&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;acs_18_median_gross_rent&lt;/code&gt;: Median gross rent in FIPS
place.&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;acs_18_median_hh_inc&lt;/code&gt;: Median household income in FIPS
place.&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;acs_18_median_age&lt;/code&gt;: Median age in FIPS place.&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;acs_18_amind&lt;/code&gt;: American Indian population in FIPS
place.&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;acs_18_asian&lt;/code&gt;: Asian population in FIPS place.&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;acs_18_nhapi&lt;/code&gt;: Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander
population in FIPS place.&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;&lt;code&gt;census_2015_*&lt;/code&gt; columns removed for redundancy.&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;to avoid confusion and possible conflicts, &lt;code&gt;.json&lt;/code&gt; and
&lt;code&gt;.csv&lt;/code&gt; file formats eliminated in favor of
&lt;code&gt;.parquet&lt;/code&gt; format.&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;municipal voteshare (&lt;code&gt;_dem2pv&lt;/code&gt;) variables have been
removed from the public use files for a number of reasons: (1) high
degree of missingness, (2) no columns estimates available, (3) potential
sensitivity&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;The matching process of videos to ST-FIPS and government types is as
follows:
&lt;ul&gt;
&lt;li&gt;videos are matched to channels’ previous ST-FIPS codes and/or
government types &lt;em&gt;if&lt;/em&gt; there is an umambiguous match, otherwise a
(1) series of regex matches with video title/description are used to
attempt to match video to the government and (2) state/place names are
extracted from each video’s title/description/caption and used to match
to an ST-FIPS entity &lt;em&gt;if&lt;/em&gt; an unambiguous match; only identified
videos are then uploaded to the database.&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;to identify the date of the meeting that the video captures, we
first try to extract the date from the title, otherwise we try to
extract the date from the description, otherwise it is discarded.&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;/ul&gt;&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;/ul&gt;
&lt;/div&gt;
&lt;div id="version-1.0-2023-02" class="section level2"&gt;
&lt;h2&gt;Version 1.0 (2023-02)&lt;/h2&gt;
&lt;p&gt;See &lt;a href="https://soubhikbarari.com/writings/localview.pdf"&gt;publication&lt;/a&gt;
for full details on methodology choices for the Version 1.0
database.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;/div&gt;
&lt;/div&gt;