About
Chicago Councilmatic tracks all things related to Chicago City Council: the legislation introduced and passed, its various committees and the meetings they hold, and the alders themselves.
You can search and browse legislation from 2011 onwards. Some interesting searches include:
- changes in how properties are zoned
- what the City is paying out in settlements
- committee appointments
- celebrating birthdays?!
Chicago Councilmatic is a free and easy way to access official Chicago City Council information.
Note that while the official term for a City Council member is “alderman,” Councilmatic uses “alder” for both brevity and gender neutrality.
What is Chicago City Council, and how does it work?
Chicago City Council is the legislative body of the City of Chicago. It consists of 50 elected alder, each representing one of Chicago's wards. City Council meets monthly and is presided over by Brandon Johnson, the Mayor of Chicago. The secretary is Anna Valencia, City Clerk of Chicago.
Generally, Chicago City Council deals with the following topics:
- city-wide policies - usually proposed by the mayor
- local ward matters - spearheaded by Alders
- matters involving individuals - miscellaneous claims & honorifics
For the nitty-gritty on how Chicago City Council works, read about its structure and rules from the City Clerk.
Types of legislation
Below are the categories of legislation in Chicago:
| Type | Description |
|---|
Legislation tags
One of the more unusual aspects of Chicago City Council is the volume of ordinances that are introduced and passed every month. Most of these are routine items like sign permits, damaged vehicle claims, sidewalk cafe approvals and honorifics.
To help sort through all of this, we classify all legislation and tag it appropriately. If something doesn’t look like a routine piece of legislation, we tag it as Non-Routine to make it easier to discover.
We're open source!
This website is open source and on GitHub - meaning that anyone can re-use or adapt the code.
Data
If you'd like to explore the data for Chicago Councilmatic yourself, we make a SQLite database using Datasette available here: https://puddle.datamade.us/chicago_council. This data is updated nightly.
The data on Councilmatic comes from the Chicago City Clerk eLMS, a custom legislation management system built by EKI Digital that was launched in June 2023. Prior to that, the City Clerk housed their data in the Legistar Legislative Management Suite built by Granicus. The data on Councilmatic is sourced from both of these systems.
The Office of the Chicago City Clerk manages the source data, and on Councilmatic, each piece of legislation provides a link to its source for reference.
Daily, DataMade collects data from the Chicago City Clerk, which we store using the Open Civic Data standard. Built in collaboration with The Sunlight Foundation, Google, Granicus, and Open North, Open Civic Data standardizes information about people, organizations, events, and bills at any level of government.
Read the OCD documentation
Team
The site was built by DataMade, a civic technology company. They build open source technology using open data to empower journalists, researchers, governments and advocacy organizations.
Contact us
Have a question about information you were seeking to find, or explanations of how Chicago City Council works? Send us an email info@datamade.us.
Developers: if you notice a bug, file an issue on our issue tracker!
Credits
Councilmatic was originally created by Mjumbe Poe for Philadelphia, during his time as a 2011 Code For America Fellow. It was the first fully-developed open data site for municipal legislation in the United States.
Chicago Councilmatic was first rolled out in June 2013 by Derek Eder and Forest Gregg under Open City.
Photo credits
- Chicago City Hall: Chicago Ideas
- Chicago City Council Chambers: Daniel X. O'Neil
- User Icon: Richard Schumann