New tool: Somerville City Council Digests
City Council meeting summaries, delivered directly to your inbox
The other day, a friend told me about a discussion at a City Council meeting that surprised me, and I found myself wishing I’d heard about it earlier.
The information was by no means secret: it’s available in the video and minutes the city publishes for each meeting. However, the videos are long (3 hours+), the minutes have a lot of noise, and in practice I found it just annoying enough to peruse them that I tended to not do it.
I realized what I wanted was a skimmable summary of each meeting sent to my inbox. So I built it!
This free tool watches for new meeting videos, extracts a transcript, summarizes the important bits, and emails out a digest.
So far, I’m finding it to be a very handy way to stay abreast of what’s happening without investing a ton of time.
It costs money to run this tool, but I’ve decided to provide it for free as a service to the city that I love. I hope you find it useful! And if you have ideas for making it even better, please get in touch.
Another company doing this at scale focused on housing policy, might be interesting for inspo! https://re-zone.ai
They were just acquired by Shovels.ai, which provides national permit data and produces some awesome content too.
I actually built the same thing haha! Well at least the scraping part. Super cool!