Information to enable local democracy
NYC Community Board Meeting Minutes—NLP & Civic Tech
A public written record of meeting transcript and synopsis
Local Community Board Meetings are now virtual, hosted on Zoom and recorded on YouTube. We provide access to the discussion with a transcript and summary
Your community board is key to local democracy. However, most New Yorkers are unaware of which community board district they live in… much less have ever attended a committee meeting.
NYC community boards have a major influence on hyper-local urban politics. With a goal to improve the area, they advise on granting permits, land-use zoning policy, program budgets, and since the COVID-19 lockdown — their role has become even more important.
These local resident organizations work to address what our city needs right now, and they actually have a lot of say in the matter. The action happens in the committee meetings, which are free to attend and open to the public. In each district, a separate committee governs over responsibilities such as budgeting, economic development, employment, health, environment, education, social services, land use, parks and recreation, transportation, and street life.
The first community board meeting I attended was the Waterfront, Parks & Environment Committee (WPE). I was actually personally greeted by the moderator when they asked if any public listeners were present since it is apparently rare to happen. The meeting was super interesting. I found out about the cost of a new facility construction plan proposal along the Hudson River Greenway bike path. I learned about the budget cuts to the parks department and how currently NYC suspended their curbside composting collection program.
Like most in-person meetings, due to the pandemic, all community board meetings are now virtual. In order to attend a meeting, you can find a calendar of events on your district’s website with a Zoom link registration. Each community board usually hosts a few meetings per month and they last between 1–3 hours.
But access to community board committee discussion is limited.
Unless more people decide to start attending their district’s Zoom meetings live or conference call-in, their only other option for discussion details is to watch the full recorded YouTube video. There is no easy way to obtain a transcript from the meeting. However, using available technology I believe there is a solution to make this information more accessible and open to the public.
My goal is to help our community stay informed about their local area. To enable more engagement and therefore representation regarding all the crazy things happening in our city right now.
With text analytics and natural language processing (NLP), this project generates an automatic transcript and synopsis of meeting minutes.
Serving as a tool to provide written text for the committee meeting discussion, we are launching a public API and email subscription service. Where any interested community member can subscribe to a community board based on location. Then on a timely basis, we would send the full transcript in addition to the summary for each meeting that recently happened, generated with our open-source text processing pipeline.
The summarized version greatly shortens the length and time required to stay informed. Allowing more people to stay in-the-know and perhaps connect with their local representatives regarding the committee discussion. This public resource also allows for text analytics and topic modeling.
In our next Medium post, we will describe the technical steps taken to automatically convert each YouTube meeting into a written text document and the NLP tools utilized to create a summary.
Stay tuned on our progress and when we launch our API and email subscription service. We are also open to collaboration and feedback! If you would like to get in touch, please feel free to reach out to me or message on Twitter.
