About The Public Gallery
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.
How it works
A language model reads the meeting video, the published agenda and the city's recorded-vote file, then writes and scores each story against a scoring rubric. 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 or a filing, 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.
Who makes it
The Public Gallery is made by Sacha Guberman, who lives in Toronto's Ward 11.