CitiLink: Enhancing Municipal Transparency and Citizen Engagement through Searchable Meeting Minutes
CitiLink is a demonstration platform that leverages Large Language Models to transform unstructured municipal meeting minutes into structured, searchable data, thereby enhancing government transparency and citizen engagement through a user-friendly interface tested on Portuguese municipal records.
Original paper licensed under CC BY 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). This is an AI-generated explanation of the paper below. It is not written or endorsed by the authors. For technical accuracy, refer to the original paper. Read full disclaimer
Imagine you walk into a massive library where the books are actually city council meeting records. These books are huge, written in very stiff, boring "bureaucrat-speak," and they are filled with thousands of pages of text. If you wanted to find out if your city council voted to fix a pothole on your street or raise taxes for a new park, you'd have to read every single word of hundreds of documents. It's like trying to find a specific needle in a haystack, but the haystack is made of legal jargon and the needles are buried three feet deep.
CitiLink is the magical librarian who comes in, reads all those boring books, and instantly organizes them into a super-smart, easy-to-use digital database.
Here is how the system works, broken down into simple concepts:
1. The Problem: The "Wall of Text"
City council minutes are public, which is good for transparency. But they are written in a way that feels like a secret code. Regular people and even journalists struggle to read them quickly. It's like trying to drink water from a firehose; there's too much information, and it's hard to catch the important drops.
2. The Solution: The "Smart Translator" (CitiLink)
The researchers built a platform called CitiLink that acts like a super-powered translator and organizer.
- The Brain: They used a type of Artificial Intelligence (specifically a Large Language Model called Gemini) to "read" the messy, unstructured text of the meeting minutes.
- The Magic Trick: Instead of just storing the text, the AI breaks it down into three neat piles:
- Who was there? (The cast of characters: council members, dates, locations).
- What did they talk about? (The topics: traffic, schools, budget).
- What was the verdict? (The voting results: Who voted "Yes," "No," or "Abstained").
3. The Result: A "Netflix for City Politics"
Once the AI organizes the data, the CitiLink website turns it into a user-friendly experience.
- No more scrolling: Instead of reading 50 pages, you can search for "Health" or "Traffic" and instantly see every time that topic came up.
- Filtering: You can filter by "Who voted for this?" or "Which neighborhood is this about?"
- Visuals: It shows you timelines and lists, so you can see the history of a decision at a glance, rather than wading through paragraphs of text.
4. The Test Drive
The team tested this system with real city workers (the people who actually write the minutes). They asked them to use the tool to find specific information.
- The Verdict: The workers loved it. They said it was intuitive and saved them time. It felt like giving them a remote control for a TV that used to only have a dial.
- The AI's Performance: The AI was very good at finding names and dates (like a perfect attendance record). It was pretty good at summarizing topics, though sometimes it used slightly different words than the humans did. It was a bit harder for the AI to figure out exactly who voted what, but it still got the job done well enough to be useful.
Why Does This Matter?
Think of CitiLink as a bridge. On one side is the government, speaking in a language only they understand. On the other side is the citizen, who just wants to know what's happening in their town. CitiLink builds that bridge, turning a wall of confusing text into a clear, searchable map.
In short: CitiLink takes the boring, hard-to-read minutes of city meetings and turns them into a smart, searchable database so that anyone can easily see what their local leaders are doing and how they are voting. It's about making democracy less like a maze and more like a clear path.
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