How we count

A meeting is one public body on one day. When a city posts a day as two videos, often a closed session and the open meeting, we count it once and show both videos.

We use the videos each city and district posted, once we have transcribed them. Most start in October 2024. A gap means we have no video for those weeks, not that the body skipped them. Videos we found but haven’t transcribed yet are counted separately, as “more found.”

A date prints only when the body’s own agenda or minutes listing shows that body meeting that day, and each meeting page links to that listing. We also check the video’s own upload or live time; a video title alone is never enough, since titles carry typos. Otherwise the meeting reads “Date not confirmed” and stays off the map, the timeline and the story.

• Lafayette School District Governing Board: we had May 14, 2026. The body's own listing says May 13, 2026. Held until fixed.
• Orinda Union School District Board of Trustees: we had Oct 21, 2025. The body's own listing says Oct 20, 2025. Held until fixed.

Length is first word to last, leaving out any silence of 10 minutes or more. Lafayette streams its closed-session break as an hour of an empty room; that hour is not counted. A video that may be cut short is left out of lengths. The typical meeting is the median, shown once a body has six measured meetings, with a 90% range from resampling whole meetings.

Members come from each body’s own roster page. Council liaisons listed on a commission’s page are not counted as its members. Members of the public are never named. Student board members are never named.

A portrait shows only when two AI models (Gemini and Claude Opus) both confirm it is the official. The photo has to come with the official’s name: on their own government’s page, or on two different news or public sites that match each other. For two Design Review commissioners with no photo online, the portrait is a still from the commission’s own meeting video, matched to the name plate at their seat. Everyone else shows initials.

Two AI readers must agree on each voice’s name, and a third reader, blind to their answer, checks a random draw of the names against the whole meeting before any show. Lines found wrong are taken down.

Each member’s minutes per meeting run from what we named (the solid bar) to what they’d have with an even share of the speech we couldn’t name (the pale bar). A meeting they sat through and didn’t speak at counts as zero. We rank a body when at least 60% of its members’ speech carries a checked name; from 60% to 80% the ranking is an early read with wider ranges. A member needs 8 meetings seated and 30% of their possible speech named; a body needs 4 members to compare. The meetings a member ran (by the body’s dated officer list, from its own minutes) are left out of that member’s minutes, and the 8-meeting minimum counts only meetings they didn’t run; each row says how many they ran. That keeps rotating mayors and chairs in the ranking without counting the talk of running a meeting. Where a body has no dated list, its presiding officer by the roster is shown apart. Ranks print as 90% ranges. Talk time counts full meetings only, never the older meetings we have only in pieces.

Questions count the times a member put a real question to staff, presenters or colleagues, in named speech only: a floor. Public speakers are counted, never named. Roll calls are read from the meeting; a meeting with none reads “not recorded.” We count talk time and roll calls, never tone or stance.

YouTube and Vimeo videos play on the page from the cued second. A video whose owner turned embedding off opens on its own site at that second. Lafayette’s Granicus recordings and Moraga School District’s Zoom recordings can’t play inside another site, so they open on theirs. Lafayette School District posts audio on Google Drive, which plays here but can’t start at a second; the page says where to skip to.