Retiring KTTCC, Starting the citymeetings.nyc Newsletter
Howdy!
First, some news and logistics:
- I'm retiring this newsletter. It has been a fun little run since mid-December.
- I'm starting a new one. It will be the citymeetings.nyc newsletter.
- I'm adding you to it. This will happen in the next 48 hours.
- Don't want to be on it? Unsubscribe when you receive issue #1 on Monday.
Why?
Keys to the City Council started in mid-December 2023 with this email to ol' buddies ol' pals of mine:
Over the last two months:
- I wrote 7 newsletters.
- I enjoyed writing some of them.
- Most took more time than I wanted to spend writing them.
- I learned a lot about how the city council operates and what they actually work on.
- This newsletter was my favorite.
- My work using AI to sift through meetings progressed significantly.
- I'm releasing citymeetings.nyc more widely soon.
- I'm giving a talk at NYC School of Data on March 23rd about this work.
- I greatly enjoyed all of this + the research I was able to do with the tools I built.
- There's a lot more I want to work on here.
- It ties into work I do professionally (I have bills to pay and also the the rent is too damn high).
I've decided to spend more time on #2.
Also: writing about city council activity is hard!
There's a a lot of activity. Not all of it is important or interesting (though much of it is, to the right audiences). And writing about it well requires more context and research than me poking around Legistar and watching meetings.
I don't have the time to do that.
But! There's still room for a more focused, useful newsletter that I'd like to share every 1-2 weeks.
The citymeetings.nyc Newsletter
For those of you who haven't seen this yet, pop over to citymeetings.nyc on your desktop and click around some of the meetings. The meeting-perusing experience doesn't work on mobile yet (but will in the next few weeks).
It's up-to-date with all city council meetings from 2024 at this point. It's a vastly easier way to browse what's going on in a multi-hour meeting. You can skip over front matter and procedure and and seek straight to questions, exchanges, and testimonies that interest you.
The citymeetings.nyc newsletter will start out as a digest of links to specific points in meetings, with some additional context. I'll also share behind-the-scenes work I'm doing on the project and solicit requests from folks who want more capabilities.
What's next for citymeetings.nyc?
The views you see on citymeetings.nyc are basic today: You can browse chapters and click on one you're interested in to seek to that point in the video and transcript.
Behind the scenes, there is a lot more going on. I use a combination of LLMs, tools I've built, and human supervision (me) to generate chapters.
Here's a GIF of this process (might take a sec to load):
My goal is to automate most of this, but that is challenging for a host of reasons I'm going to talk about at NYC School of Data.
In the short term I'm going to continue working on this, will keep city council meetings up to date with a time lag of 24-48 hours, and will add some basic features to navigate citymeetings.nyc (like summaries and meeting lengths).
I have other fun plans, too. They include:
- Other meetings: I want to bring CB meetings into the mix and potentially NYC planning meetings.
- Semantic search:
- Across everything: I want to be able to type "discussions regarding solar power" or "tell me what council member Restler has talked about regarding transit" and get an answer + citations.
- Within videos: this is a 3-hour long many-chapter hearing on requiring shore power for cruise ships in Red Hook and Manhattan. I want to be able to say "tell me how the EDC is handling traffic congestion in Red Hook when cruises are docked" or "summarize council member Aviles' grievances against EDC" and get a useful answer with citations.
- Alerts: "Tell me when X is talked about or council member Y said something."
- Requested Features: What do folks use this for? Who uses it? What do they want?
I expect some subset of these to roll out slowly over the course of this year. I hope you follow along.
Thanks for subscribing to this newsletter if I sent you an email back in December, for sending me feedback (and very long emails about community boards), and to the folks I don't know who joined along the way. I appreciate it!
Comments? Feedback? Reply to this email or send me a note at vikram@citymeetings.nyc.
Toodles,
Vikram