About

Agenda Watch was created by Big Local News, a nonprofit project at Stanford University that supports local journalists by providing data and tools to assist in reporting, and by fostering collaborative news partnerships. The initial project began in a Stanford Computational Journalism class and was developed by Erin Bennett, Amy DiPierro, Patricia Wei, Holden Foreman, and Chris Stock.

Our Agenda Watch platform gathers meeting agendas and minutes from city councils, school boards and other local decision-making bodies from around the U.S., in order to make them easily searchable by reporters and members of the public.

Our platform also provides the ability to receive alerts when potentially newsworthy items appear in new documents.

Agenda Watch gathers documents from thousands of agencies using an open-source web scraping framework. We scrape agencies daily and send alerts to subscribers when we find new documents matching their customized search queries.

If you'd like to chat with us about Agenda Watch, drop a note via email or @BigLocalNews. Have feature ideas or would like us to add a new agency to the platform? Check out this form.

Thank you to our supporters and funders: