About this site

What is here, where it comes from, and what it cannot tell you.

Where the data comes from

Every meeting on this site was collected from the government's own agenda portal. Nothing is retyped and nothing is inferred. Each meeting links back to the agenda, the packet, the minutes, and the video the government published, and those links are the record. This site is an index of them.

Candidate filings come from the North Carolina State Board of Elections, which publishes them as a file and updates it daily while filing is open. Board membership comes from the same systems the counties use to run their meetings.

The Sources page lists every government, the platform it publishes on, and when this site last managed to reach it.

What the summaries are

Agenda summaries and the written trend narratives are produced by a language model reading the published agenda documents, and are dated. They are a reading aid, not a record.

A model can misread a table, miss a late addendum, or state something with more confidence than the document supports. Open the agenda before you rely on anything here. Where the source publishes a recorded vote, the wording shown is taken from the source rather than summarized.

How topics are assigned

Every agenda item is tagged against one fixed list of 34 topics, the same list for every government. That is what makes the comparisons possible: a rezoning in Apex counts as the same thing as a rezoning in Cary. Items are tagged twice, once by keyword rules when they are collected and again by the model when it reads the agenda, and the two sets are merged.

Counts on the trends page are agenda items, not meetings. A meeting with forty rezoning cases counts forty times, which is usually what you want when asking where a town's attention is going.

What this site cannot tell you

• Whether a meeting is still happening. Agendas are republished and meetings are cancelled, sometimes hours ahead. This site collects every few hours.
• What happened at a meeting, unless the government published minutes or a recorded vote. Discussion is not captured.
• Anything about the governments it cannot reach. Several sites refuse connections from servers; those show as failing on the Sources page rather than showing an empty calendar.
• How to speak at a meeting, beyond what each government publishes. The rules shown are only the ones checked against the source, and they change. Every meeting page links to the government's own page for that.

Using the data

Everything on the site is available as data. The meeting list, any filter, and any search is also a calendar subscription, an RSS feed, a CSV file, and a JSON endpoint. Follow one town, one board, or one topic and never open this page again.

Corrections

If something here is wrong, it is wrong in one of two ways. If the government's own agenda says something different, this site has a bug. If the agenda itself is wrong or out of date, the government is the only one who can fix it, and the contact link on each meeting page is where to start.