Data

Name: Waltham public meetings, summaries, and decisions
Creator: Publick
License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

What Waltham Publick collects, as files you can download and reuse. They're rebuilt every morning with the site.

Meetings, summaries, and decisions

Every meeting this site lists (234 meetings), with its board, date, time, place, and status, the city's agenda and minutes, and their AI summaries and decisions, joined together in one file.

Download meetings.json

The decisions alone are a spreadsheet, decisions.csv, and new agendas and minutes are in an RSS feed.

Every chart on this site has a table with the same numbers, and a CSV download under it.

Before you use it

The summaries and decisions are written by AI, and they can be wrong. They aren't checked by a person before posting.
The city's agendas and minutes are the official record. Every summary in the file links the document it came from, and the copy saved here.
The file has only what the site shows: a decision or agenda item our fact check couldn't find in its document is left out, and so is a summary taken down after a reader reported an error.

Credit

The summaries, headlines, decision lists, and data that Publick compiles are free to reuse, even commercially, under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license (opens in new tab) (CC BY 4.0). Please credit them like this, with a link to the document the summary came from:

Summary by Publick (publick.org), AI-generated from the city's agenda.

Some of what's here keeps its own terms, such as 311 requests: what you can reuse, and how.

The format of meetings.json

One JSON object, in UTF-8. Its version is 1: a field may be added without notice, but a field renamed, removed, or changed in meaning gets a new version number. Dates are YYYY-MM-DD, times HH:MM in the town's time zone, and a field with nothing to say is null.

The file

Field	What it holds
`format`, `version`	Always "publick-meetings", and the format's version number.
`town`	The town's name, state, and this site's address.
`built_at`	When the file was made.
`license`	The license, and where its terms are.
`meetings`	Every meeting, oldest first.

Each meeting

Field	What it holds
`id`, `url`	An identifier that doesn't change, and the meeting's page on this site.
`board`, `title`	The board or committee, and the meeting's name as the city lists it.
`date`, `start_time`, `end_time`	When it meets. A start time that isn't likely, such as 3:00 AM, is left out.
`status`	"scheduled", "cancelled", "postponed", or "rescheduled".
`special`, `listed`	Whether it's a special meeting, and whether the city still lists it.
`location`, `remote_url`	Where it meets (name, address, and the city's description), and its link to join online.
`recording_url`, `listing_url`	Its recording, and where the city lists it.
`correction`	Our correction of the city's listing, with the reason, the evidence, and the day it was checked.
`agenda`, `minutes`	Its agenda and minutes, described below.

Each agenda and minutes

Field	What it holds
`url`, `saved_copy_url`	The document on the city's website, and the copy saved here.
`saved_at`, `posted_by`, `sha256`	When the copy was saved, who posted the document, and the copy's SHA-256 hash.
`is_minutes`	For minutes, false when the city filed another document as the minutes.
`summary_withheld`	Whether its summary was taken down after a reader reported an error.
`summary`	Its AI summary, or null when there isn't one yet: headline and summary, in English; for an agenda, items: the main agenda items; for minutes, decisions: each with its kind ("decided", "recommended", or "procedural") and its text; not_shown: how many items or decisions were left out because they couldn't be matched to the document; model and generated_at: the AI model, and when it wrote the summary; fact_check: what our fact check found when it compared the summary's names, numbers, and decisions with the document's text. "ok": everything was found. "failed": something wasn't, and it's left out. "weak": the document is scanned, so only what could be read was checked, and nothing is left out. "unchecked": there was no text to check against. null: not checked yet. checked: how the summary was checked, as the line under it on its page says. "pdf": against the city's PDF. "partial": against the pages of the PDF that have text. "ai": against an AI transcription of a scanned PDF. "none": not checked, or minutes summarized before each decision was matched to the minutes' own words.