About the-compact

the-compact is a public preview that makes local government easier to follow. We ingest publicly available council and board meeting recordings, transcribe them, summarize them with a small open-weights language model, and surface what was discussed and decided.

How it works

• We pull videos from each jurisdiction's public YouTube channel.
• Audio is transcribed by an open-source speech-to-text model (Whisper).
• An open-weights LLM (Llama 3.1 8B) summarizes each meeting into a paragraph and bullets, and extracts topic mentions.
• Transcripts, summaries, and the source video are linked together so you can jump to the exact moment a topic comes up.

What this isn't

• Not affiliated with any municipality.
• Summaries are AI-generated and may miss nuance — always check the original video for anything load-bearing.
• Not real-time. New meetings appear within a day of being posted to the source channel.

Coverage today

Pilot communities: Bloomfield Township, MI (active) and Bloomfield Hills, MI (coming soon). We're picking the next jurisdictions now — let us know who you'd like to see.