Why We Built This
Local government has outsized impact on daily life, but most of the public record is technically available and practically inaccessible. We're trying to change that.
Local government has an outsized impact on daily life
Housing, schools, land use, public safety, human services, economic development, public works, and more are all heavily shaped by local government. These are the kinds of issues that come before city councils, zoning meetings, and school boards and can make the difference between a community that thrives and one that doesn’t.
Public information is often technically available but practically inaccessible
Many local government meetings, agendas, and supporting documents are now recorded and posted online, but they’re not always easy to find. Furthermore, local governments often produce dozens of hours of meetings and hundreds of pages of documents each month. They use legalistic, formalized language. They often require a lot of context to fully understand. Following and synthesizing it all could easily be a full-time job. But most of us don’t have that kind of time. It feels odd that some of the decisions that are closest to home and affect us the most are also some of the most foreign to us.
We believe more people would participate if it were easier to understand what was happening
At this point, we’ve watched a lot of local government meetings and there’s nothing more discouraging than watching important public decisions discussed in an empty room. Many of us want to be informed and participate, but we don’t have an easy entry point into the process. When understanding what’s happening requires hours of meetings and hundreds of pages of documents, it’s easy to stay on the sidelines. We believe more people would participate if local government were easier to follow.
We also believe local journalism is essential
In the past, it was common for local journalists to regularly attend local government meetings. Today, many local newsrooms have fewer reporters covering more ground. That has not changed the importance of the work. Journalists provide investigation, context, interviews, accountability reporting, and community knowledge that cannot be captured from meeting materials alone.
We want LocalMatters to help journalists do more of the work only they can do.
For newsrooms, LocalMatters is designed to make local government easier to monitor at scale. We help identify issues worth investigating, summarize what happened in recent meetings, surface public comments, and link claims back to the primary source materials that support them. Our goal is to help journalists spend less time finding and parsing raw materials and more time reporting, verifying, explaining, and holding power to account.
What LocalMatters is
LocalMatters builds tools that make local government easier to follow. We do this in two connected ways:
For residents, we make selected summaries publicly available so more people can understand what is happening in their communities.
For journalists and newsrooms, we are building deeper tools to help track meetings, identify story leads, follow issues across time, review source-linked claims, and turn public records into reporting opportunities.
We use AI to help organize and summarize public meetings, agendas, packets, minutes, recordings, and related documents. We ground AI in primary sources so it does not pull in outside information, invent quotes, or go beyond what is supported by the public record.
How we verify information
Accuracy and transparency are central to LocalMatters.
When LocalMatters makes a factual claim, we aim to link that claim directly to the meeting timestamp, agenda item, document page, or other public source that supports it. That means readers and journalists can go directly to the source and verify the information for themselves.
These source links also allow us to audit LocalMatters outputs over time and improve the system as we learn.
For more on how we use AI and how we verify claims, see our How It Works page.
Who We Are
LocalMatters was founded by Blair Beverly and Ben Kramer.
We came to this work from different backgrounds but with a shared interest in civic participation, local journalism, and the systems that help communities function well.
Blair spent 14 years at Google before moving into civic media and digital public infrastructure. For much of the last decade, his work as a software engineer has focused on building AI systems that analyze, organize, and extract insights from human conversations and large collections of text. More recently, he has worked with public-service news organizations and civic institutions exploring how technology can support public participation.
Ben has spent his career founding and building organizations that address social issues. He started Awamo, a fintech platform that increased access to finance for more than a million people across East Africa, and has since worked across climate and impact investing. His work has always centered on how to build things that last and actually reach the people they are meant for.
LocalMatters does not sell user data. We are building toward a sustainable model that keeps public civic information accessible while also supporting paid tools for newsrooms and other professional users who need to monitor local government more deeply.
Together, we started LocalMatters because we believe local government is too important to remain inaccessible. Our goal is simple: help more people understand what is happening in their communities and help the journalists who make that understanding possible.
Get in Touch
We’d love to hear from you. Write to us anytime at hello@localmatters.fyi to share thoughts, ask questions, request features, or just say hi.