City councils make decisions every week that shape your streets, your taxes, and your neighborhood. The records are public — but they're long, dense, and written for lawyers. PorchLite reads them so you don't have to.
Almost everything a city council does is, by law, public. The agendas are posted. The documents are online. Anyone can attend. And almost no one does — not because people don't care, but because the public record is nearly unreadable. A single meeting can run to hundreds of pages of ordinances, contracts, and procedural language.
That gap — between technically public and actually understandable — is where PorchLite works. We take each agenda item and explain it in a few plain sentences: what's being decided, what it costs, and who's involved. The goal is simple: a resident should be able to know what their council is about to do in the time it takes to read an email.
PorchLite is an independent civic project. It is free, ad-free, and open source. It is not run by the city, not affiliated with any party, campaign, or organization, and it doesn't take positions on what the council should do.
It describes; it doesn't argue. You won't find PorchLite telling you a vote was good or bad, or scoring your councilmember. We summarize the public record as neutrally as we can and link you straight to the original documents. What you do with that information is up to you.
Each day, PorchLite checks the city's official meeting system for newly posted agendas and pulls in every item, along with the original supporting documents.
An AI model (Claude, by Anthropic) reads each item and writes a short, neutral summary — what it is, the money involved, who's behind it — and flags items that look significant, such as large dollar amounts or items placed quietly on the consent agenda.
Before anything is published, a human editor checks each summary against the source document for accuracy and neutrality. Nothing goes live, and nothing goes in the weekly email, without that review.
Reviewed summaries are published here, with links to the original record, and gathered into one email every Sunday — the week ahead, before the council votes.
We describe what the council is doing in factual terms. We don't editorialize, rate, or campaign.
Every summary links to the original public documents. If we ever get something wrong, the record is one click away.
PorchLite's source code is public under the AGPL license. Anyone can see exactly how it works.
No ads, no paywall, no selling your data. Running costs are small and covered by voluntary contributions.
PorchLite uses an AI model to write its first-draft summaries. AI is good at turning dense documents into plain language quickly — but it can misread, miss nuance, or oversimplify. That's exactly why a human reviews every summary before it's published.
Even so, a summary is a summary. It is not the official record, and it shouldn't be the last word for anything you intend to act on. If a decision matters to you, follow the source links and read the original — and if you think we've gotten something wrong, tell us. We'll fix it.
One plain-English email, every Sunday. Free, and one click to leave.
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