Watchtower
A municipal meeting intelligence platform that automatically ingests, extracts, and summarizes local government meeting materials into plain-language briefings.
Discuss this ventureWhy this problem persists.
Municipal government meetings produce vast documentation that is difficult for citizens, researchers, and media to navigate. There is no accessible way to stay informed about local government without reading hundreds of pages of agenda materials.
What we are building.
Watchtower automates the discovery and ingestion of public meeting documents, extracts text using PDF parsing and OCR, and generates AI-powered narrative briefings. A searchable web interface makes municipal information accessible to anyone.
The intended users.
What the product does.
Automated discovery of new and updated meeting materials
Document ingestion from city agenda portals
PDF text extraction with OCR fallback
AI-generated narrative briefings by meeting type
Searchable interface for all meeting content
Hierarchical agenda and document views
Mobile-first meeting explorer
Authentication and access management
Pipeline monitoring and Telegram notifications
Original document access alongside AI summaries
The structural gap.
City meeting portals are designed for compliance, not comprehension. Agendas are published as dense PDFs with no summaries, no search, and no way to understand what matters without reading everything. Citizens, journalists, and researchers who want to stay informed about local government have no practical alternative to manual review — which means most people simply do not engage.
Watchtower is in active development with an operational backend pipeline. The discovery, download, extraction, and AI briefing systems are complete. The FastAPI REST layer and frontend authentication are implemented. The mobile meeting explorer with pagination and filtering is live. Full-text search and detailed meeting views are in progress. The system is currently focused on the City of Frisco, Texas, with a design that supports expansion to additional municipalities.
Built on a shared foundation.
Watchtower is part of the broader Civio civic intelligence ecosystem. While Civio Datalytics focuses on election data and Civio Walker supports field operations, Watchtower adds the policy and governance layer — making it possible to understand not just who is running for office, but what the people in office are actually doing. The shared MackJoy infrastructure means the AI briefing system, data pipelines, and deployment patterns developed for Watchtower are available across the portfolio.
We are actively seeking collaborators.
How it is built.
The backend is a Python pipeline using FastAPI, SQLAlchemy, PostgreSQL, and Backblaze B2 for document storage. Playwright handles JavaScript-rendered agenda portals. pdfplumber and Tesseract OCR provide layered text extraction. AI briefings are generated through OpenRouter with contract-driven JSON output. The Next.js frontend uses Material UI, Zustand, and TanStack Query. TypeScript types are generated directly from the FastAPI OpenAPI spec.