Who I am
I'm Skylar Youngblood, a data engineer based in Centennial, Colorado. I moved to Colorado about four years ago and spent a couple of years living in Denver before settling here. I've always believed that data, when made accessible, can empower people to hold their institutions accountable.
Outside of this project, I write articles focused on public transparency — using data to shed light on how governments and institutions operate. CoCivicWatch is one of my largest and most personal transparency efforts.
Why I built this
Public meetings are one of the most important mechanisms citizens have to influence local government. But they're also incredibly difficult to engage with. Meetings run for hours, agendas are buried in PDFs, and most people simply don't have the time to watch a four-hour city council session to find the two minutes that affect their neighborhood.
I built CoCivicWatch to change that. The goal is simple: make Colorado's public meetings searchable, summarized, and accessible — so that anyone, regardless of time or technical skill, can stay informed about what their government is doing.
What it does
CoCivicWatch automatically pulls public meeting data from Colorado government sources, downloads recordings, and processes them through an AI pipeline to produce:
- Full transcripts with speaker identification and timestamps
- AI-generated summaries broken into navigable chapters
- Key quotes — the moments that matter most from each meeting
- Voting decisions — who voted for what, and when
- Agenda cross-references — linking discussion back to the official agenda items
How it works
The pipeline runs automatically on a regular schedule. Meeting metadata is pulled from Legistar (the city's official meeting management system). Audio and video are downloaded and transcribed using Whisper, a state-of-the-art speech recognition model. Summaries, chapters, and key quotes are generated using large language models (Claude and DeepSeek-R1).
All human oversight is maintained — the AI assists but does not make editorial decisions. Transcripts and summaries are flagged for review when confidence is low.
Coverage
CoCivicWatch currently covers Denver-area public bodies including the Denver City Council and related committees. The project is designed to expand to additional Colorado municipalities and governing bodies over time.
Get in touch
Found an error? Want to suggest a meeting body to cover? Have feedback? Visit the FAQ or reach out directly.