Govmeeting
Meetings are the heart and soul of democracy. They are where people present opposing opinions on important issues and formally make final decisions.
In the Athenian Assembly of 500 BC, a quorum of 6,000 of the 43,000 citizens was needed to conduct business. In the 10th century, the Icelandic Althing was held in a natural outdoor amphitheater and all citizens could attend.
Today it is rare to see more than a dozen attendees at a council meeting in a town of 30,000 people. Is this still democracy?
Some public meetings are broadcast on local TV. But a very small percent of people actually watch. Local newspaper report on some issues. But they choose what to report and a small percentage read their local paper.
The few attending a meeting, including some council members, may strongly oppose a decision. But it is too easy for the council majority to totally ignore them. They know that less than one percent of the voters will ever hear what they said.
The purpose of this project is to preserve those discussions and make them easily available to all. It uses a combination of intelligent software and community volunteer effort.
Disillusion with government starts at the local level. Fixing this requires a grassroots effort at that level.
Functional overview
Shortly after a government meeting takes place, you will be able to:
- Receive a summary of issues discussed via text message or email.
- Optionally receive a full transcript of the meeting via email.
At any time, you can go online and:
- Sign up to receive text alert or emails whenever a specific issue is discussed.
- Use a more powerful tool to browse a specific meeting.
- Search all past meetings for issues discussed.
- See all that was said in the past on any specific issues.
- See what any specific official said on any specific issue in all past meetings. This is especially helpful at election time.
For a detailed functional design, see: Functional Design
“Enough with the jibber-jabber, fool! Show me how it works!”
Well, the work is in progress. But here you can find some Demos of working code.
Technical overview
- Client application in Typescript and Angular(5).
- Server in C# and ASP.NET Core 2.0.
- Google Cloud and Speech API for voice recognition
- SQL database uses Entity Framework Core, code-first object model.
The "Core"version of ASP.NET Core and Entity Framework is open-source and runs on Windows, Mac and Linux.
For a detailed system design, see: System Design
Quickstart
- Clone the repo:
git clone https://github.com/govmeeting/govmeeting.gitor download zip file:https://github.com/govmeeting/govmeeting/archive/master.zip
In Visual Studio
To run Angular front-end and Asp.Net server:
The front-end is what you see at govmeeting.org.
- Open solution "govmeeting.sln"
- Set startup project to
Web_App. Press F5.
To run back-end processing of recordings and and existing transcripts.
This uses Google Speech API for transcription. You would need to first: Create GCP project Then:
Set startup project to
WorkFlow_App. Press F5.Copy (don't move) either the either sample MP4 recording or PDF transcript files from testdata to Datafiles/INCOMING.
The program will recognize that a new file has appeared and start processing it.
In Visual Studio Code
Install the following VS Code extensions:
- "Debugger for Chrome" by Microsoft
- "C# for Visual Studio Code" by Microsoft
Open the repository folder in VS Code.
In the debug panel, set the launch configuration to "Web_App & Chrome" to run the server and Angular app. Press F5. This configuration enables debugging both Typescript & C# in the same session. For an explanation, see: https://github.com/Microsoft/vscode-recipes/tree/master/Angular-SpaTemplates
Contacts
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