The Interactive Public Record.
Public meetings are where a city decides, out loud and on camera. Then the recording becomes a six-hour file that almost nobody opens again.
GovCenter turns that tape into a record you can watch, search, cite and share. Who spoke, on which item, how it was decided, and the exact second it happened.
Governance, at high resolution
Some fields have a live statistics layer that anyone can read. Local government, where the decisions closest to home are made, has almost none. GovCenter builds that layer over the public meeting.
It describes what a body did in public. It is not political, social or demographic scoring.
Augmented civic media
A new medium for public service: produced, interactive and built on data. The city's own recording stays the source. GovCenter adds the context a viewer needs to follow it.
From tape to record
- Find it. Each meeting starts from the recording and agenda the city already posts.
- Read it. Every word is transcribed to the second. Voices are told apart, and each agenda item is placed on the tape.
- Confirm it. A person checks names, roles and votes before they appear. Until then, anything the machine suggests stays a draft.
- Thread it. A matter heard in March, continued in May and decided in June becomes one story across meetings.
- Share it. Any moment links to its second on the tape, and any item can be cut into a clip.
The record, and nothing louder
- Every claim points to a playable second of the tape. GovCenter's only source is the public record.
- A vote shows as carried or failed only when that was stated on the record. An outcome is never inferred.
- Officials and staff are named. Members of the public are shown as "Public speaker", and the transcript keeps what they said.
- When a figure comes from a machine and no person has reviewed it yet, the page says so.
- GovCenter reflects the record. It never speaks for the city.
Disclosure: GovCenter was founded by Ryan Wold, a member of the Vacaville Parks and Recreation Commission, who also reviews that commission's records. Each of its meetings carries this note.
The archive now. Live next.
Today GovCenter works from meetings that have already happened, starting with Vacaville, California. The same layer is built to run while a meeting is in session, so the record keeps up with the room.
What we are still refining
This page changes as the work teaches us. These are the questions we are working on now.
- Which figures say something real about how a body works, and which only look precise?
- How should a correction reach the record so that the old version stays visible?
- Who confirms that two meetings are about the same matter?
- What does it take to bring the next city on as quickly as the first?
Last revised November 2, 2026.