Platform Updates

We rebuilt structured agendas for more than 100 government meetings whose action items had previously failed to extract — including large county-commission packets that had crashed our processing model. Their motions, resolutions, and decisions are now broken out as searchable agenda items, so you can find exactly what each meeting acted on.

Meeting attendance for the Fletcher Town Council is now tracked: 145 attendance records across 26 meetings, extracted from the council's own minutes — including which members were present or absent at each meeting. Fletcher's minutes use a phrasing our extractor previously didn't recognize; with that fixed, attendance coverage for this body went from zero to 26 meetings.

We removed 45 incorrect vote records that our AI extraction had attached to non-votable agenda items — things like adjournments, proclamations, public comment periods, and bare section headings. We also tightened the extraction rules so genuine votes (public hearings on resolutions, consent-agenda approvals, ordinance readings) are never mistakenly filtered, and flagged 3 votes whose recorded outcome contradicts their tally for human review.

We found and recovered 59 documents across 21 Asheville meetings that were linked inside agendas but never captured — staff reports, resolutions, and presentations. They are processing now and becoming searchable.

We corrected 422 vote records that showed misleading tallies: 397 votes displayed as "passed 0-0" when the count was simply not in the source minutes (they now honestly show no tally), and 25 votes whose counts were impossible for the body's size (often digits bleeding in from resolution numbers). We also removed duplicate agendas, duplicate attendance rows, and placeholder names that crept in from documents — and added guards so none of these can recur.

Search result highlighting now safely escapes all displayed content, so unexpected HTML in scraped meeting documents or transcripts can never run in your browser.

Meeting transcripts are now organized into clean, speaker-separated blocks instead of one undifferentiated wall of text — so you can follow the back-and-forth of a meeting at a glance. Where we've identified a speaker by their voice, their name appears on their remarks; everyone else is consistently labeled (Speaker 1, Speaker 2, …) so you can always track who said what. Speaker name coverage will keep growing as the system learns more voices.

You can now share a direct link to a specific moment in a meeting. Click the share icon next to any line of the transcript to copy a link that jumps straight to that point in both the video and the transcript — perfect for citing what was said or posting to social media.

We upgraded our transcription engine to WhisperKit and hardened it for long meetings. The result: more meetings get accurate, fully-searchable transcripts — and even multi-hour sessions now transcribe reliably.

You can now see at a glance what content is available for each meeting — look for Video, Docs, Transcript, Recap, and Preview badges on event cards throughout the site.

See how Sunshine Meetings is growing with our new Stats page. Track the number of public meetings, government bodies, transcribed videos, processed documents, and more — all in one place. This page provides transparency into the platform itself, showing the breadth of civic data being made accessible to the public.

Help improve Sunshine Meetings! Our new usability testing program lets you accept tasks, complete them at your own pace, and share feedback on your experience. Track your contributions on the leaderboard and earn points as you help make the platform better for everyone.

Stay in the loop! The new Updates page shares the latest platform improvements, new data, and bug fixes as they happen.

Events without a video recording now show 'Awaiting Meeting Recording' instead of the misleading 'Processing Meeting Recording' message. Events with no documents or video sources are now labeled as 'Listing' to distinguish them from events actively being processed.

Events are now automatically tagged with topic categories like Budget, Zoning, Historic Preservation, and Disaster Recovery. Tags are generated by Sunshine AI from meeting summaries and displayed as filterable badges on event cards. Use the new Topic filter on the events page to find meetings by subject area.

You can now save search queries from the search results page and manage them from your Dashboard. Saved searches remember your sort preference and exact-match setting.