About Sunshine Meetings
Our Mission
At Sunshine Meetings, we believe that local government works best when it is visible, accessible, and understandable. Our mission is to bridge the gap between residents and decision-makers by providing a one-stop digital platform where the people's business is open to everyone. We take the complexity out of civic participation, turning daunting bureaucratic processes into clear, actionable information.
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Sunshine AI
In today's world, AI is rightly viewed with healthy skepticism. We're on a mission to demonstrate how these tools can support a better-informed community when guided by the right values. At Sunshine Meetings, we use AI to make public information more accessible and easier to explore, but we do it differently than the tech giants. By running open-source models locally on a single Mac Mini, we're working to address some of the common harms of modern AI: public data is never sent to massive cloud models, and it is never used for training. We've also tackled the environmental cost head-on; by keeping our workloads local, we've capped our power draw at just 40 watts—less than a standard lightbulb.
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A Sunshine Labs Project
Sunshine Meetings is a flagship project of Sunshine Labs, our Asheville-based initiative dedicated to building tools that address community needs and promote open government. For over a decade, our team (a department of PRC Applications) has committed to the "20% for the Community" model, donating thousands of hours to projects that hold our government accountable and make life easier for our neighbors. Sunshine Labs was born from the idea that we can use technology and open data to build tools that address community needs, promote open government, and improve civic engagement.
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Proudly Supported by the
WNC Civic Hubs Grant
We are honored to be a recipient of the Civic Hubs Business Grant, an initiative by The Industrial Commons in partnership with the Trust for Civic Life. This support recognizes Sunshine Meetings as a digital "civic hub" that can support the interactions between residents and local government in WNC. This funding has allowed us to scale our efforts, ensuring that rural and urban residents across the region have the same high-level access to local government information.
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