AI opens access to county meeting videos
Key Takeaways
Spend enough time in county government and some of the meetings may start to run together. In Sherburne County, Minn., “going to the tape” to check on what happened has become a lot easier.
Using an open-source program put together by a Google developer’s side project, the county’s meeting videos are now synched with transcripts, which users can search. The search function brings viewers to the point in the meeting video where the topic came up.
What does it mean for the county?
“Transparency,” said Commissioner Tim Dolan. “The average citizen doesn’t want to sit through a two-hour meeting for the one item that interests them. Now they don’t have to.”
Learn more
In his first term on the Board of Commissioners, Dolan was frustrated by the pace of technological uptake.
“The adoption of technology in government seemed to be lacking,” he said. He took to Twitter, asking Microsoft and Google about the lack of a noticeable push for innovation in government. To his surprise, he heard from Google the next day.
“It was a pleasant surprise,” Dolan said.
“We worked with developer Sean Maday to adapt a system Maday had developed for his hometown of Superior, Colo.’s meetings — Engaged Citizens AI.”
Maday wrote about recorded meeting videos: “These tools are antiquated one-way panes of glass that do not foster much tangible interactivity. Even the assumption that citizens will watch video of public meetings online may be a bit of an anachronism at this point.”
Maday used Google’s speech-to-text function, which he estimated at about a 90 percent accuracy rate in 2019, to transcribe the audio.
“The ability to pull out the link and instantly have access to what had been discussed…the most valuable thing is the ability to give context, the decisions we make and the conversations we have,” Dolan said. “And the longer we use it, the more historical context we can get.”
He sees it as a way to clearly communicate decisions through the county workforce, because no longer will managers have to rely on board packets and notes to relay pertinent discussions, when they can simply “run the tape” and prevent anything from being lost in translation.
“No shorthand, you get the answer verbatim,” he said.
Speaking of translation, Dolan hopes the transcripts can be translated into Spanish, Somali and Hmong so that access to public meetings can be widened to native speakers who live in Sherburne County.
“Instead of having to know exactly what they want in English, they could search in their native language,” Dolan said. “That opens up public participation to new populations in the county.
“For me, transparency and the ability to communicate directly with constituents was a big part of my platform,” he noted. “This is a fundamental change because we’re not just pulling back the curtain, we’re making it easier to pull back the curtain. It’s a nice victory and gives you positive momentum — changes can happen if you find the right partners.”
Sherburne County has processed more than a year’s worth of Board meetings through Engaged Citizens and is adding more. Dolan hopes to have all public meetings in the county searchable, so a user looking for one topic can get what they need from the Board of Commissioners, the planning commission, school board and more.
And, he hopes it helps residents understand the Board’s decision-making process.
“It’s hard to sit in a board room and make decisions knowing how hard it can be for people to understand it all,” he said.
