u/ovenmage

Some friends and I built a small experiment to make city council meetings easier to navigate.

The problem I ran into as a resident was that city council meetings are boring and take too long to attend in person. The online minutes/recap were pretty hard to digest.

I'm experimenting with AI transcripts, search, and summaries to make local government easier to follow (along with an alerting system).

I'm curious:

• Is anyone else working on similar tools?
• What would make something like this actually useful?
• What would you be skeptical of?

Happy to share details or a demo if people are interested.

P.S. It's really cool to fnd this reddit community and see many others are working on similar goodwill projects!

When following the data center issue in Monterey Park, I noticed a lot of people (including myself), were really surprised when they found out right before a critical vote. I sat through a meeting (my first), and the meeting took 5 hours! (Thank you to all our staff and representatives who do this all the time).

I thought it be might be helpful to make it easier to follow city council meeting updates, (i.e. make it easier/less painful to stay informed about various issues with a website or something), so I've been experimenting with some friends to build it.

Open to any feedback, thanks!