About Civic Translator

Civic Translator helps residents better understand the decisions being made by their local governments by transforming complex public meeting materials into clear, easy-to-understand summaries and visual analyses.

School boards, city councils, county boards, and other public entities make decisions that affect students, families, taxpayers, businesses, and entire communities. Yet many residents simply do not have the time to read hundreds of pages of meeting packets or watch hours of meeting recordings.

Our analyses begin by collecting publicly available meeting agendas, board packets, supporting documents, and other published materials. These resources are reviewed to produce concise packet summaries that help residents understand what is scheduled to be discussed before a meeting takes place.

After meetings conclude, publicly available meeting audio or video is transcribed and cross-referenced with the agenda and packet materials to produce comprehensive meeting summaries. This process helps connect what was planned with what was actually discussed, considered, and decided.

One of Civic Translator's unique features is cross-meeting change analysis. Instead of treating each public meeting as an isolated event, Civic Translator compares consecutive eligible regular meetings from the same public body to identify meaningful changes over time. These comparisons highlight new proposals, policy changes, budget developments, recurring issues, and shifting priorities so residents can understand not only what happened at a meeting, but what changed since the previous meeting.

Civic Translator provides longitudinal public meeting analysis by connecting individual meeting summaries into a timeline of government activity. Cross-meeting comparisons help residents, journalists, researchers, and community organizations track how proposals develop, which issues continue from meeting to meeting, and when important decisions or changes occur. We may also compare similar agenda items, policies, budgets, and initiatives across neighboring school districts or other local government organizations to provide broader context.

Civic Translator works alongside local Accountability Partners—community members committed to improving transparency and helping their neighbors better understand local government. By organizing and translating publicly available information into accessible summaries and analyses, Accountability Partners help strengthen informed civic participation.

Civic Translator does not advocate for any political party, candidate, or policy position. Our goal is to make publicly available government information easier to discover, understand, and discuss so residents can make more informed decisions based on the official public record.