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A couple years ago, Durham resident Alex Rosen made a list of problems in the world that he thought were worth focusing on. At the time, there were some hot topics at Durham City Council that people were chatting about — but who’s sitting through those long, boring meetings?
Rosen, a technologist, had been experimenting with the new wave of AI and he started thinking through how it could be used to capture those meetings for local journalists, civic creators and engaged residents. A platform where people could easily review agendas, speakers and transcripts and then — without any video editing skills — easily produce a video or reel to share with the public.
Rosen started tinkering and had the first prototype ready in April 2024. Two years later, the SeeGov platform is now capturing meetings from 200 local governments, including 65 in North Carolina.
Southpoint Access produces weekly highlights from Durham City Council, including this recent meeting discussing the impact of drought and a one-year moratorium on new data centers and crypto mining. The Carrborean began this week’s video with Carrboro Poet Laureate Dr. Amanda Bennett reciting a poem in honor of Juneteenth, followed by updates on a county crisis diversion facility, emergency operations and storm preparedness, and the impact of state legislation that prevents local governments from “down-zoning” in land use policies. And Ashevegas elevated the push for better public safety infrastructure through “Lenny’s Law” at a Woodfin Town Council meeting following the deaths of cyclists.
The platform is easy to use and includes lots of helpful guidance as you navigate meetings and select your clips. And, with recent seed funding from the Knight Foundation, SeeGov will be able to expand to 1000 communities across the country.
To learn more, we chatted with SeeGov Founder and Executive Director Alex Rosen about what the platform does, how it can lead to more civically engaged communities and why all AI platforms need a human co-pilot. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
How does SeeGov work?
Alex Rosen: We have a system that monitors the feeds where local governments post their videos. We download the video and transcribe it. We do speaker identification, we detect the agenda items, and we do these moment by moment breakdowns.
Once all that is processed, we notify the insiders who are monitoring those meetings that there's a new meeting ready, and it's time for them to review and inform their community. They get an email, they jump in, they can see everything that happened. They can watch the video, and they can mark specific moments that they think are important as highlights from the meeting.
The next level is you can take those highlights and refine them as video elements to share. We make that super easy. We have AI suggestions, but you also can use the words in the transcript to select which ones you want to include in your video. There's no video skills required, which is key.
We then suggest some text to contextualize what happened, but all the text that we suggest is provided as a suggestion that is editable. We really want people to add context and to fix anything if there's an error. And we require you to do that before you move on. So you refine these moments that you've identified as the highlights of the meeting, and then you can compose videos from those moments. You might do a full highlight reel, like a 10 minute recap of the meeting, or you might be focused on just a social video, because you saw something related to a story you did, and you can maybe put it on Instagram, and point people to your story. So you can choose your video format, there's a little bit more tweaking to potentially crop the video, you review the captions, add a headline and then you push the button, and the system goes and does the work.
We tried to make it as easy as possible for that “find news” use case, and then for the “enhance my stories with video” or “create a video product” use case that could be standalone as well. All of this material is generated by the platform. We also generate suggested social posts, and you can distribute this material through the platform, or you can take it and embed these videos on your site,you can get them out to wherever they should be.
Our desire is not to be a destination that competes with news organizations. We want to get this material out, and we trust that news organizations know how to reach their audiences, and we want to help them grow and deepen those relationships with their audiences.
Some local governments do share livestreams, videos and transcripts of their meetings, and there's a few other AI platforms recording meetings and offering summaries. Where does SeeGov fit into this and what gap are you all filling?
Alex Rosen: Typically what you get from the governments is not easy to navigate. If they do tie their video to agenda items, the significant agenda items often take an hour to go through. You might get pointed to the start of an agenda item, but you can't see the pieces within there. So SeeGov makes these really long meetings much more navigable. We break down the meeting into what we call moments that are typically like two to three minute portions of the meeting, logical break points, and then summarize that. You can think of it like YouTube video chapters, it's that same concept, but at a much more granular level to allow you to navigate through this long meeting content.
We identify the agenda items, and then each moment underneath the agenda item, and we do speaker identification as well, so that you can start to see, when did this city council person talk about this issue, those types of things.
The navigation aspect is really big for journalists, because even if they attend a meeting, they might want to get back to a specific point in the meeting, and it's very difficult to find with either government platforms or YouTube, often. So we have a better transcript, we have these moments that make it much more navigable.
As far as other tools that are out there, what we've seen is there are AI tools that try to go too far: they try to write a report about a meeting. And to be honest, coming at it from a technology background, we originally thought we could make these video recaps fully with AI. But being in the role of the person, actually trying to identify what's important, and being someone who lives in the community, and having that kind of context, it became clear that the AI at that time was not ready for it. I don't think it's ready for it today, and I'm not sure I even want it to be.
I like that we make it easy for a human who's committed to a community to look through with their knowledge of the community and identify what's important. We're not trying to pick out the five things that happened and just present that. We are giving you every public comment, everything that happens, so you can use your journalistic judgment to determine what is really newsworthy within your community context.
If you go to the SeeGov website and don’t see your local government, it doesn't mean you don’t offer those meetings, right?
Alex Rosen: Correct. We just need them to sign up and let us know what local governments should be added, and they will get them very soon thereafter. Also, I'll just note that on the website you see the longer form highlight reels, but you don't see the short form verticals, which are actually out on Instagram in county-specific SeeGov accounts. When reels are published there, the creator has the opportunity to invite their organization as a collaborator, so that they can easily add it to their own reels on Instagram. And all of the material can be downloaded and published to other platforms as well.
How many people are involved? I'm guessing you all are pretty small.
Alex Rosen: It's been just me, and my AI assistants doing as much as possible to build this out. And now I’m super excited to have Andrea Verykoukis as our lead on the partnership and development side of the house. Andrea has done some great things previously in terms of growing a nonprofit newsroom nationally and bringing a journalistic lens to the things that we're doing. She's North Carolina based with a great network across North Carolina; that's important to us as well.
One of the bigger goals is that SeeGov leads to more civic engagement and participation. Why do you think getting more digestible clips of local government on social platforms could lead to that?
Alex Rosen: I have done get out the vote door knocking for municipal elections before and it was not uncommon to meet people who had an interest in participating but felt that they didn’t know who was who or what the issues were. So they were more likely to opt out of participating in their local democracy. And that to me is a problem that SeeGov can be a big part of addressing. When they know who the people are, when they see them in the grocery store, or maybe they realize how groups show up to city council, it might be just 10 people who got together on an issue, they get heard and action is taken and things really do work. Democracy can work. I want to show more examples of that because that will increase participation not just during elections but between elections when our officials need to hear from the community about what’s important and what would make their communities better. So I’m very excited about the opportunity.
Learn more about what SeeGov offers local journalists and civic creators and sign up to get your local government meetings on the platform. |
