Glossary

Organizations and teams

• City Bureau (CB) - the nonprofit behind Documenters.org; performs the final staging QA on scraper output before launch.
• Public Data Works (PDW) - the team that owns Documenters platform operations; performs secondary code review and merges scrapers to staging.
• CTD - the development team that writes and maintains the spiders.
• Documenters.org - the public-facing platform that scraper output ultimately powers.

Scraper vocabulary

• Spider - a Scrapy class that extracts meeting records from one source. One spider per agency per source.
• Spider factory - a pattern where one file generates multiple spiders from a spider_configs list - each entry becomes a distinct spider slug.
• Mixin - a shared class (e.g. LegistarSpider) that spiders inherit from to reuse a source platform's parsing logic.
• Slug - a spider's name value; the identifier used in scrapy crawl, the Airtable registry, and output file names.
• Meeting record - one JSON object a spider yields; the schema is the contract.
• Naive datetime - a datetime with no timezone info attached. Meeting start/end values are always naive; the spider's timezone attribute declares which local zone they are in.
• spider_configs - the list of dicts a spider factory iterates over; each entry's name and agency produce a separate spider.
• Classification - the meeting type vocabulary from city-scrapers-core: Advisory Committee, Board, City Council, Commission, Committee, Forum, Police Beat, Not classified.

Pipeline vocabulary

• Slug table - the Airtable spider registry the sync workflow upserts into; keyed by agency name.
• Reusable workflow - a GitHub Actions workflow declared with on: workflow_call, defined once in city-scrapers-core and invoked by caller stubs in each consumer repo.
• workflow_run trigger - the second half of the two-workflow pattern; runs on the base repo's default branch so it safely holds secrets.
• Staging - the Documenters environment where CB evaluates scraper output before launch. A PR merges into staging but stays open through CB QA.

Docs-platform vocabulary

• RepoScope - the callout at the top of a page declaring which repository it describes (meetings-viewer or scrapers).
• Drift check - the CI job (npm run docs:drift) that compares documented claims against the master source of truth and reports conflicts.
• Master - the authoritative source a claim is checked against (code, generated artifacts, or a mirrored source doc).
• Mirror - a byte-faithful copy of an external source under docs-platform/sources/, kept for drift detection - never edited to fix content; the fix lands upstream.
• llms-full.txt - the generated file at /llms-full.txt containing every docs page as clean Markdown, for agent consumption.