Problem Addressed
The idea for the gateway came out of Campaign Lab’s hack nights, where volunteers started exploring how we could make local democracy more transparent. Council minutes often have lots of information that is relevent to campaigners, journalists, and citizens but info is often buried deep in documents and PDFs. We wanted to see if we could create a tool to make this rich data source more accessible.
Approach & Implementation
Early versions scraped a handful of councils and tested whether we could pull useful information from long, jargon-heavy meeting notes. It makes minutes and documents searchable and accessible, using large language models (LLMs) to summarise key information. Since then, the project has been developed further by Poteris, with support from Campaign Lab. It now covers 80% of councils, with plans to expand both historic coverage and search capabilities. As more power is devolved locally and as local newsrooms shrink tools like this are essential for holding decision-makers to account and equipping campaigners with the information they need.
Resources
As is the case for all of our tools, iterative improvement is only made possible by testing and user feedback. If you have any feedback for this tool, please feel free to get in touch with [email protected]