AgendaItem to deal with sub-events

[joepio]

While we were importing parliamentary data from local governments (municipalities from the Netherlands) and national governments (e.g. the Dutch parliament), we found that governments tend to structure their meetings with agenda items. The meeting software that they use also structures the various themes and issues in this way.

Currently, the popolo specification lets events have child events. Therefore, we should store these items as 'events'.

However, this poses a problem. Say, for example, that a web application wants to render a calendar that displays all meetings for some government. It fetches all events, but this also includes the children of events. This creates multiple events for a single point in time (one parent + all sub-events), where people are present at both.

I suggest that we introduce a new schema for these sub-event children: Agenda Items. I suggest that its schema inherits schema:CreativeWork consists of the following attributes:

• A name string (optional)
• A description string (optional)
• A startDate and an endDate (optional)
• An array of attachments (I don't know what's the best schema for this, but as a client I'd like to be able to see the URI of the attachment, its title, its data type and its size)
• An array of motions (items on which can be decided and or voted)
• A parent event URI (required)
• An index integer which represents the position in the array of agenda items (required)

What are your thoughts on this?

[jpmckinney]

Indeed - there's some prior work we can reuse for agenda items, including:

• http://opencivicdata.readthedocs.io/en/latest/proposals/0004.html
• http://vocab.deri.ie/pdo#AgendaItem
• Finnish API (I need to re-discover it)

[wfdd]

It seems slightly odd to me to conflate the items on the agenda with the act of discussing those items.

[jpmckinney]

I think the suggestion is just to have a class for items on the agenda.

I don't think the suggestion is for one object to do the work of both agenda items and the event itself.