{"id":29604583,"url":"https://github.com/bhrutledge/somerville-city-council","last_synced_at":"2026-02-08T01:32:26.624Z","repository":{"id":71236846,"uuid":"277362041","full_name":"bhrutledge/somerville-city-council","owner":"bhrutledge","description":"Geographic data for wards and city councilors of Somerville, MA.","archived":false,"fork":false,"pushed_at":"2020-07-07T14:35:04.000Z","size":302,"stargazers_count":0,"open_issues_count":4,"forks_count":0,"subscribers_count":1,"default_branch":"master","last_synced_at":"2025-07-20T15:40:03.115Z","etag":null,"topics":[],"latest_commit_sha":null,"homepage":"","language":"Makefile","has_issues":true,"has_wiki":null,"has_pages":null,"mirror_url":null,"source_name":null,"license":"cc0-1.0","status":null,"scm":"git","pull_requests_enabled":true,"icon_url":"https://github.com/bhrutledge.png","metadata":{"files":{"readme":"README.md","changelog":null,"contributing":null,"funding":null,"license":"LICENSE","code_of_conduct":null,"threat_model":null,"audit":null,"citation":null,"codeowners":null,"security":null,"support":null,"governance":null,"roadmap":null,"authors":null,"dei":null,"publiccode":null,"codemeta":null,"zenodo":null}},"created_at":"2020-07-05T18:38:10.000Z","updated_at":"2020-07-07T14:35:06.000Z","dependencies_parsed_at":null,"dependency_job_id":"351dcaee-b054-4af8-9d08-021a021534ea","html_url":"https://github.com/bhrutledge/somerville-city-council","commit_stats":null,"previous_names":[],"tags_count":0,"template":false,"template_full_name":null,"purl":"pkg:github/bhrutledge/somerville-city-council","repository_url":"https://repos.ecosyste.ms/api/v1/hosts/GitHub/repositories/bhrutledge%2Fsomerville-city-council","tags_url":"https://repos.ecosyste.ms/api/v1/hosts/GitHub/repositories/bhrutledge%2Fsomerville-city-council/tags","releases_url":"https://repos.ecosyste.ms/api/v1/hosts/GitHub/repositories/bhrutledge%2Fsomerville-city-council/releases","manifests_url":"https://repos.ecosyste.ms/api/v1/hosts/GitHub/repositories/bhrutledge%2Fsomerville-city-council/manifests","owner_url":"https://repos.ecosyste.ms/api/v1/hosts/GitHub/owners/bhrutledge","download_url":"https://codeload.github.com/bhrutledge/somerville-city-council/tar.gz/refs/heads/master","sbom_url":"https://repos.ecosyste.ms/api/v1/hosts/GitHub/repositories/bhrutledge%2Fsomerville-city-council/sbom","scorecard":null,"host":{"name":"GitHub","url":"https://github.com","kind":"github","repositories_count":286080680,"owners_count":29216084,"icon_url":"https://github.com/github.png","version":null,"created_at":"2022-05-30T11:31:42.601Z","updated_at":"2026-02-08T00:10:47.190Z","status":"ssl_error","status_checked_at":"2026-02-08T00:10:43.589Z","response_time":63,"last_error":"SSL_connect returned=1 errno=0 peeraddr=140.82.121.5:443 state=error: unexpected eof while reading","robots_txt_status":"success","robots_txt_updated_at":"2025-07-24T06:49:26.215Z","robots_txt_url":"https://github.com/robots.txt","online":false,"can_crawl_api":true,"host_url":"https://repos.ecosyste.ms/api/v1/hosts/GitHub","repositories_url":"https://repos.ecosyste.ms/api/v1/hosts/GitHub/repositories","repository_names_url":"https://repos.ecosyste.ms/api/v1/hosts/GitHub/repository_names","owners_url":"https://repos.ecosyste.ms/api/v1/hosts/GitHub/owners"}},"keywords":[],"created_at":"2025-07-20T15:37:40.970Z","updated_at":"2026-02-08T01:32:26.619Z","avatar_url":"https://github.com/bhrutledge.png","language":"Makefile","funding_links":[],"categories":[],"sub_categories":[],"readme":"# Somerville City Council Data\n\nGeographic data for wards and city councilors with names and contact information.\n\nOpen any `.geojson` file on GitHub to view the data on a map; for example:\n[Councilors and Wards](https://github.com/bhrutledge/somerville-city-council/blob/master/somerville_city_council.geojson). See [Mapping geoJSON files on GitHub](https://docs.github.com/en/github/managing-files-in-a-repository/mapping-geojson-files-on-github) for details.\n\nThere's also a [Google Map](https://www.google.com/maps/d/edit?mid=1NdzlUAOXIOcEXqEbAkA9X0g-auts70Ue). However, it might not be in sync with the files in this repo; there's an [open issue](https://github.com/bhrutledge/somerville-city-council/issues/4) with more details.\n\nFeedback welcome on the [issue tracker](https://github.com/bhrutledge/somerville-city-council/issues).\n\n## Build instructions\n\nThis uses the [ogr2ogr](https://gdal.org/programs/ogr2ogr.html) command-line tool from [GDAL](https://gdal.org/) to convert between formats. On macOS, you can install GDAL with Homebrew:\n\n```\nbrew install gdal\n```\n\nThen, to re-download the data and rebuild the output, run:\n\n```\nmake -B\n```\n\n## Data sources\n\nThe ward boundaries are available as a zipped [ESRI Shapefile](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shapefile) at \u003chttps://data.somervillema.gov/GIS-data/Wards/ym5n-phxd\u003e.\n\nI couldn't find information about the city council in a structured format. Scraping \u003chttps://www.somervillema.gov/citycouncil\u003e was suprisingly difficult due to inconsistent HTML structure and [obfuscated emails](https://www.somervillema.gov/cdn-cgi/l/email-protection#4d3e393f2837222c39212c3f2a280d2a202c2421632e2220). I ended up entering the data manually into a Google Sheet, thinking that a CSV would be the easiest thing to work with.\n\n[Google Sheet: Somerville City Council](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1JCxK8rt9akj3HUKUE54cydyKgTsZnA9iSNZEGP_6d8Q)\n\nThe sheet includes other details, like website/Twitter/Facebook links, plus the latitude/longitude of each councilor's address, which was quick to add via a [Sheets add-on](https://gsuite.google.com/marketplace/app/geocode_by_awesome_table/904124517349) (but there's also an [open-source macro](https://github.com/nuket/google-sheets-geocoding-macro)).\n","project_url":"https://awesome.ecosyste.ms/api/v1/projects/github.com%2Fbhrutledge%2Fsomerville-city-council","html_url":"https://awesome.ecosyste.ms/projects/github.com%2Fbhrutledge%2Fsomerville-city-council","lists_url":"https://awesome.ecosyste.ms/api/v1/projects/github.com%2Fbhrutledge%2Fsomerville-city-council/lists"}