NZ Council Minutes Discovery

Discovers public New Zealand council agenda and minutes documents from council websites and emits evidence-backed document rows for civic monitoring, planning, policy research, and local-government workflows.

What it does

This actor crawls supplied council homepages or meetings pages one level deep, finds agenda/minutes/meeting document links, and outputs normalized rows with:

• document URL
• document title
• detected published date
• council name
• document type (agenda, minutes, or meeting)
• confidence score
• evidence text
• capture timestamp

It is not a generic PDF scraper. It filters for council meeting evidence so users get useful agenda/minutes rows instead of every brochure or asset on a council site.

Inputs

• sourceUrls — council homepage or meetings/agendas pages to crawl.
• regions — optional known region hints. Current built-ins: Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch, Canterbury.
• useDefaultSources — when no explicit source URLs or known region hints are supplied, use built-in Auckland, Wellington, and Christchurch council sources.
• maxItems — maximum document rows to emit.

Example input

{
  "sourceUrls": [
    "https://www.aucklandcouncil.govt.nz/",
    "https://wellington.govt.nz/"
  ],
  "maxItems": 100
}

Output fields

• recordType
• sourceUrl
• title
• publishedDate
• council
• documentType
• confidence
• evidenceText
• capturedAt

Monetization

Suggested model: paid per result, minimum around $5 USD.

Potential buyers:

• civic researchers
• planning consultants
• journalists
• property/development analysts
• compliance and public-policy monitoring teams
• local-market intelligence users

Local run

npm install
npm test
apify run

Or directly:

$node src/main.js

Publish checklist

npm test
npx --yes apify-cli validate-schema
node src/main.js

Only publish after a real smoke run produces useful document rows for at least one council source.

Limits and caveats

• The actor currently crawls one level deep from source URLs.
• It targets public HTML pages and linked PDF/DOC/DOCX documents.
• Some councils may hide meeting documents behind search systems, JavaScript apps, or document portals; those may need source-specific adapters later.
• Confidence is heuristic, not a legal assertion.