MEC Lobbyist Data

This repo contains data and code for exploring lobbyist disclosure data in Missouri state government.

About the data

We acquired the data from the Missouri Ethics Commission (MEC).

Lobbyist Principle Report Data

We downloaded two Excel files from this page.

• LobPrinReportData.xls with "Lobbyist/Principle Report" selected
• PrinLobReportData.xls with "Principle/Lobbyist Report" selected
• We saved these original files in the data/orig/ directory of this repository.
• We opened each file in Microsoft Excel, exported them in .csv format and saved them in data/prep/

About the app

This project is built with Datasette, a tool for exploring and publishing data.

Datasette is built on top of SQLite, so we needed to load the separate csv files into a SQLite database.

The csvs-to-sqlite command-line tool, which is part of the Datasette ecosystem, made this task rather easy.

csvs-to-sqlite data/prep/*.csv data/mec-lobbyists.db

About the deployment

We deployed our instance of Datasette on Google Cloud Run.

We're used the [email protected] Google account, which already had Google Cloud Services enabled for a previous RJI-related project.

To set up a new project, we had to log into the Google Cloud Console, create the project (named "mec-data") and enable a couple of APIs for the project. (Not clear if these steps need to be repeated for each deployed instance of Datasette).

Then we needed to install gcloud command-line interface, initialize it and configure our credentials and project settings. These steps need to be repeated for each contributor's machine.

Then anyone can deploy or update the deployment.

datasette publish cloudrun data/mec-lobbyists.db