Letter from the editor
Hello, Windsorites! Windsorians? Neighbors.
I want to extend a profound thank you for joining this mailing list, introduce myself, and tell you what I’ve been working on since you signed up.
Firstly, an invitation
What’s up in Windsor is nearing v1.0, at which point it is officially public. To cement this milestone, I will be announcing its launch at a town council meeting later this summer, date to be determined.
If you’re able to join, I’d be happy to meet you. (I created WUiW because people are too busy to attend council meetings, so my feelings aren’t hurt if you can’t make it!)
Once v1.0 is launched, the weekly digest you signed up for will soon follow!
In the meantime, the site is live and being tested. I encourage you to use it, use the “report error” feature if you see the need, and share it with anyone you think would find it useful!
More about me
I am a New Jersey native, moved to West Hartford in 2013 after getting an engineering job in the Pratt & Whitney-sphere. After a decade of life happening, my wife and I moved to Windsor in 2023, with our son on his way. Since the move, we have fallen in love with Windsor. There’s a good chance you’ll run into us at Washington Park with our toddler.
I am curious by nature, and in our ever-polarizing climate I long for concise, factual information with a clear line to the source. Years ago, my idea for What’s up in Windsor was originally meant for stuff at the federal level. After participating in Windsor’s Citizen’s Academy I quickly realized that deploying this idea locally is even more valuable, and Windsor is perfect for it.
What I’ve been working on since you signed up
Data Integrity – My program logs every individual request for information from the town website. So not only does a summary reference the source with a hyperlink, there’s also a log of the HTTP request to prove that document was the one used for the summary. It also logs every interaction with the AI provider used to generate each summary.
Human Oversight Layer – this one took the most time to implement. Not because of complexity, because of importance. I built myself an interface to review each summary as it’s published. Further, there is a “report error” form for readers to point out what I may have missed. Part of what makes this work is the ability for real, live humans to point out nuances and context only they can sense.
Technical Documentation – for anyone who wants to geek out, feel free to read the docs. The software I developed to make What’s up in Windsor tick will be made public under an open source MIT license at v1.0.
The WUiW philosophy
What’s Up in Windsor is an online civic archive meant to supplement the official documents published on Windsor’s website. It is, by design, boring; meant to operate quietly and reliably just “be there” when you feel curious about… what’s up in Windsor.
It is not a news publication. It is not an attention-seeking click-bait machine. We already have the Windsor Journal and social media to scratch those itches.
On Artificial Intelligence
I am torn on AI. I put a lot of thought into my decision to use it for this product. At the outset, there were many AI providers to choose from. I ultimately chose Anthropic because its Claude model best met my needs. That, and the Anthropic organization aligns with the values of What’s Up in Windsor.
There’s a lot of negative connotation surrounding AI, and for good reason. AI slop grinds my gears, and using “AI” as a buzzword everywhere just plain bothers me. However, I believe AI is neither good nor bad… it is potent; and over the next 5-10 years humanity is tasked with learning how to manage its potency. So, after hemming and hawing, here are my reasons to use Claude as What’s up in Windsor’s first “journalist.”
The source information is explicitly constrained to one meeting document at a time, and the task is simple summarization. This significantly minimizes the risk of AI hallucination.
This application is genuinely useful to my neighbors.
With this, I will step off my AI-generated soapbox: The summaries produced by What’s Up in Windsor are gateways to official documents. While I put a lot of work into making them accurate, they are still imperfect, secondary sources of information; but what they do offer is a welcoming pointer to the primary source, and some context to send you into it with.
On Public Info
Government records are technically public. In practice though, accessing them often means navigating disorganized databases, complicated request processes, documents that are long, jargon-heavy, and stripped of context — assuming you can find them at all.
Douglas Adams captured this perfectly. The Vogons in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy made their plans to demolish Earth publicly available — posted on a bulletin board in the Alpha Centauri system, a mere four light years away. Technically transparent. Practically inaccessible.
That gap between technical availability and genuine public access is almost never intentional. Most government bodies, especially locally, are acting in good faith. But good faith doesn't focus the lens — it just points it in the right direction.
What's Up in Windsor exists to focus that lens, using a balance of automation and human integrity to make public information actually public.
Again, Thank You!
Thank you very much for signing up and signing up early. Without you, What's Up in Windsor would be like every other body of public information: rich and reader-less.
Warm Regards,
Mike