I rolled my own. I hadn’t heard of this one, but I looked into stuff like OpenStates (now privately for-profit owned, ugh). My city just uses a Wordpress site so it’s structured enough. I’m looking at building something to ingest cities with Granicus and one other big local government meeting recorder via API whose name I forget. That should get decent coverage. There’s no way to catch the long tail of every local government’s recording process. Some cities people will just have to do manually. But it’s easy enough with LLM help.

Yep, I manually listened to the meeting recordings (easy to find the spots based on the transcript timestamps) for any quotes. There are also meeting minutes and agendas with supporting docs to corroborate against (e.g. for dollar amounts). They really don’t make stuff up all the time if you root them in data.

Nope, I used a minute fraction of the technology they have, along with open records as is my right in this country, to stand up for my Fourth Amendment right to travel without creeps stalking my every move. I need to make my specific framework a bit more generic and then I'll put it here on HN. Or just offer a platform where people can bring an OR key and it can run on their city.

I grant the lol-concept, but citizens monitoring their government is extremely different from governments monitoring their citizens.

It used to be called journalism