June 10, 2025
Public meetings are an important means for residents to participate in civic action at a local level. However, in the US they are not well attended, particularly by residents from marginalised communities.
The main difficulty in generating attendance is a lack of awareness, particularly because local government meetings and agendas are often scheduled and released on short notice.
Although most residents cannot attend every meeting, they often make time or find a surrogate to attend sessions for the issues they care most strongly about.
Open Meeting acts and laws across the US require local governments to post upcoming meeting agendas in advance — and providing residents with an easy way to learn about upcoming meetings that they are interested in could help increase civic engagement.
An “agenda alert” system notifies users of upcoming public meetings and topics they are invested in before they occur. This system collects, scrapes, and processes agendas using Natural Language Processing to identify and tag relevant agenda items based on user preferences.
The system is being piloted with an Indigenous nation in the US to help the community enact their sovereignty and proactively uphold their rights. Local towns and counties regularly neglect to involve Indigenous partners in policy discussions, thereby forcing individuals to seek out policy and meeting information on their own. This exacerbates existing strains within Indigenous governments, including understaffing and a lack of finances.
By identifying and tagging relevant agenda items, Indigenous partners can be supported in pursuing their policy interests. This case study applies agenda alerts to the specific context of a Native Nation, but the use case for such alerts could be extended to other groups hoping to leverage public meetings to enrich their civic life.