About LocalLens
As school board members, we’ve seen firsthand how democracy suffers when local decision-making is invisible. We’re alarmed at how difficult it is to follow the actions of our school boards, city councils, zoning boards, board of elections, and other local bodies that have so much influence over our lives. We’ve set out to provide advocates, journalists, and organizations with a research tool to easily follow local government.
Every meeting summary you read on this website is written by a computer. We use emerging large language model technology and government records to automatically summarize local government meetings.
This technology is not perfect. However, we believe the democratic value of making all local government meetings accessible and searchable is worth the risk of some errors. At our scale, we will infrequently but inevitably make mistakes. Misspellings of names are the most common. If you spot a mistake, please let us know and we will fix it. On every meeting summary, we link to the local government record we used to generate the summary. You should review that source before taking action on something you read here.
Computers are no match for humans. For one, computers can never replace in-depth local reporting. We are not a news service. Instead, we hope to make the local research process easier for advocates, organizations, and the journalists who uphold our democracy through their reporting.
We welcome any ideas, feedback, or criticism you may have about our effort. We are continuously working to refine and improve our process. We need your feedback to continue making this service as good as it can be.
Thank you for joining us on this journey to make local government more transparent, accessible, and accountable.
