About The Public Gallery
What this is
City council decides where new parks go, how often the bus comes, and what gets built on your street. No other level of government touches your day-to-day life as directly, and none are as responsive to your feedback and influence. A federal bill needs a national movement. A committee item needs a handful of residents who showed up before the vote.
The problem is that almost none of it reaches you in time. A single meeting's agenda can be comprised of dozens of items, and the ones relevant to you look exactly like the routine ones. So the process ends up rewarding whoever can spend a Tuesday afternoon reading it. That is not a statement about who deserves a say. It is a description of who currently gets one.
The Public Gallery exists to close that gap.
- Make local government accessible. Every council and committee meeting, read and written up in plain language, including what was actually said out loud rather than only what the agenda records.
- Show what matters to you. Items are ranked by how much they land on an ordinary resident's life, not by where the clerk filed them. Follow the issues and the councillors you care about.
- Make it clear how to act. Items you can still influence are flagged so you can make your voice heard. A decision you hear about after the vote is just news.
The Public Gallery is made by Sacha Guberman, who lives in Toronto's Ward 11.
How scores work
A council agenda treats receiving a routine report and a major transit overhaul the same way. The city files items by department, not by what they do to you, which is why reading the agenda straight through is an unfriendly experience that can leave you more confused than you were before. Ranking stories that are relevant to you means you can understand what is going on at city hall and how you can make your voice heard.
A score is editorial judgment made legible. You always see the reasoning, never just a number.
We ask two questions
How big a deal is this at city hall? Routine paperwork, a contained decision, a multi-year deal, or something that fundamentally changes what future councils can do. Dollar figures alone do not raise this. What raises it is whether the money is a departure from what was agreed, and whether the decision is hard to undo.
Does it impact your life? Scored for right now, not someday. Invisible, touches a narrow group, felt this week by a large group of people, or citywide. A study about a subject everyone cares about still changes nobody's week. It scores on what is true today, and the story says what it becomes if it advances.
The two are kept apart on purpose. An item can be enormous inside city hall and change nothing about your week, or procedurally small and land directly on your street. Trackers that collapse these into one number end up ranking by institutional importance, ignoring how these decisions impact you personally.
The tiers
A story reaches the top only if one of the two questions maxes out, or a group feels it now and there is still time to act. A pile of medium scores cannot add up to the top. The top tier stays scarce so it means something.
The catches
Some items get flagged because the paper record alone would mislead you: a motion that reads as gutting a policy when the mover was saving it, or a "further study" that quietly buries a decision past the end of the term. Those flags come with verbatim evidence from the meeting, and they exist because the transcript beats the agenda.
Honesty rules
- Every claim traces to the record. Voice votes are reported as voice votes; tallies are never invented.
- Closed-door items are scored on what is public, and the story says plainly that the decision happened behind closed doors.
- Councillors and registered candidates are named against the official roster, so a name the captions garbled is never printed as fact.
- During election campaigns, coverage describes; it does not endorse.
Where the record comes from
Every story is built from the official record: the meeting video, the published agenda, and the city's recorded vote.
A language model reads those three, then writes and scores each story against the rubric above. The model selects and compresses, it does not decide who is right, and it does not originate claims. Every statement traces back to a vote, a transcript, a filing or a published source we name and link, and the reasoning behind each score is shown on the story itself.
Personalization decides what you see. It never changes how something is described. Nothing is suppressed because it cuts against what you follow.
Contact
Questions go to hello@publicgallery.app, and a person reads them. Account and data requests go to the same address; the privacy page has the detail.