Council Watch

The Problem

City councils, school boards, and county commissions make decisions that directly affect your life — zoning changes, budget allocations, policy shifts — and most people have no idea what’s happening. Meetings are scheduled at inconvenient times. Minutes are buried in PDFs on obscure government websites. Voting records aren’t easily accessible or searchable.

By the time most citizens find out about a decision, it’s already been made. The system isn’t designed to keep you informed. It’s designed to keep things quiet.

The Vision

A tool that monitors local government meetings automatically, sends you alerts when topics you care about come up, and tracks how your representatives vote over time. All of it browsable, searchable, and shareable.

Start with a few cities. Build the infrastructure once, then let communities contribute scrapers and parsers for their own local governments. A network effect where every new city that gets added makes the whole system more valuable.

What’s Been Done

• Concept validated through conversations with civic tech communities
• Identified target data sources for 3 pilot cities
• Researched existing tools (Open States, Councilmatic) — there’s a clear gap at the local level

How to Help

Just Interested? Request to join and tell us which city or county you’d want to see monitored first.

Have Ideas? We need input on which data points matter most to citizens and how to present them clearly.

Ready to Build? We need Python developers for web scraping pipelines, NLP engineers for document parsing, and frontend developers for the public dashboard.

Know Local Government? Domain expertise in how city councils and school boards actually operate is invaluable.