Portfolio Demo · AI · Search
Council Minutes AI Search
An AI-powered search tool that makes council meeting minutes accessible through an 11-city South Bay public demo while the underlying archive expands across 45 California cities and 9,610 meetings.
- OpenAI Embeddings
- Semantic search
- React
- TypeScript
- Tailwind CSS
- 11-city demo · 45-city archive
Interactive demo
Search the Record
AI-powered semantic search across council minutes, planning commission hearings, and committee reports. The public demo focuses on 11 South Bay municipalities while the broader archive now spans 45 California cities and 9,610 meetings.
Search the 11-City South Bay Demo
AI-powered search across meeting minutes, hearings, and committee reports from 11 South Bay municipalities. The underlying archive now spans 45 California cities and 9,610 meetings. Enter a query above to begin.
Case study overview
The problem
City council meeting minutes are public record, but practically inaccessible. They're published as multi-hundred-page PDFs that technically meet the transparency requirement while functionally hiding the information. Keyword search fails on scanned documents, nothing is indexed across meetings, and a resident trying to find when their neighborhood sidewalk project was discussed has to download and manually search dozens of files.
The approach
Legistar API and direct city portals for structured meeting data, OpenAI embeddings for semantic search, and a custom retrieval layer. Meeting minutes are ingested, chunked, embedded, and indexed automatically. The public demo keeps the original 11-city South Bay workflow fast and legible while the underlying archive now stretches across 45 California cities and 9,610 meetings. Natural language queries surface relevant agenda items, votes, and decisions with citations back to the source meeting.
Why it matters
AI-powered access to government documents reduces FOIA request volume, lets staff answer constituent questions in seconds instead of hours, and dramatically improves transparency without changing how minutes are published. Agencies keep their existing workflow while Stoa keeps an 11-city South Bay public demo and a broader archive spanning 45 California cities and 9,610 meetings current in parallel. One search interface, two clear coverage layers, room to scale.
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