Pandas json_normalize produces confusing `KeyError` message?

In this case, I think you'd just use this:

In [57]: json_normalize(data[0]['events'])
Out[57]: 
  group  schedule.ID schedule.date schedule.location.building  \
0     A          815    2015-08-27                        BDC   
1     A          816    2015-08-27                        BDC   

   schedule.location.floor  
0                        5  
1                        5  

The meta paths ([['schedule','date']...]) are for specifying data at the same level of nesting as your records, i.e. at the same level as 'events'. It doesn't look like json_normalize handles dicts with nested lists particularly well, so you may need to do some manual reshaping if your actual data is much more complicated.