Unofficial Amesbury
Smaller cities and towns have it tough - there is a lot to running a community of 15,000+ people, but there’s not quite enough money to have dedicated people actually documenting and reporting on everything that’s happening.
In our community while we do have a reasonable city website, everything related to government business is locked inside PDFs, and generally if you want to know what the city council did in November, you’ve got to wait until they approve the minutes sometime in December or January. And then you’ve got to read a whole bunch of stuff you don’t care about (pole permits anyone?) to get to the meat of the important issues.
I really want to know what’s going on in my town government, but I don’t necessarily have time to watch three hours of City Council, Conservation Commission, Zoning Board of Appeals, School Board, and Planning Board every night of the week. And without doing that, it’s really hard to keep track of everything that’s happening.
What’s interesting is that all the content already exists - it’s in those aforementioned PDFs, or in the transcripts of the meetings themselves that could be pulled from videos. Really all that’s needed is a bit of organization and summarization.
And do you know who’s great at that? AI.
Unofficial Amesbury - at www.amesbury.city - is exactly that. It turns all the data that the city is already generating into structured information using OpenAI’s API.
Everything about the site is fully automated (except for the from the editors blog) - and doesn’t require any process changes from what the city already does to create a comprehensive cross linked database of committees, meetings, projects and ordinances for a few dollars in tokens a month.