🍎 citymeetings.nyc #8
City of Yes For Housing Opportunity
Howdy!
Two weeks ago the NYC City Planning Commission held a 15-hour hearing on City of Yes for Housing Opportunity.
I've published all 203 testimonies on citymeetings.nyc.
Each testimony is linkable and comes with a video, transcript, and key points. There is also a table you can use to search/filter by:
- Name
- For/against
- Borough
- Stated affiliations
- Which elements of the proposal they discussed.
All of this information was extracted using language models, too.
Finally I've licensed the data under Creative Commons along with code and prompts that extract which elements of City Planning's proposal were discussed.
You can find the data and code on Github.
Please let me know if you run into any issues.
There are more compelling ways to use language models against this data that I'd like to explore:
- You can measure an organization's influence by cross-referencing its talking points against people's testimonies or things politicians say.
- For marketing, you can put together highlight reels with statements you want to publicize.
- On a larger scale, you can trace the origin and evolution of an idea or a piece of legislation.
I am still actively working on tools to produce high-quality "chapterized" NYC City Council meetings fast. This work appears to be on track for the end of the summer.
And I think there are sophisticated, newly-possible, useful tools to build on top of government meeting datasets for folks in journalism, policy research, advocacy, government, and government affairs.
To discuss any of these (or related) use cases for your organization, email me at vikram@citymeetings.nyc.
Thanks for reading!
Comments, questions, or feedback? Reply to this email or shoot me a note at vikram@citymeetings.nyc