What is Open Council?
Open Council makes London, Ontario’s city council meetings searchable and accessible. Browse meeting transcripts, explore voting records, track councillor attendance, and ask questions about any topic discussed in council using our AI-powered chatbot.
Why was it made?
City council decisions shape our communities, but meeting minutes are often buried in PDFs and hard to navigate. Open Council was built to make local democracy more transparent and accessible to everyone.
Who made it?
Open Council was created by Heenal Rajani at the Institute for Community Sustainability, a London-based non-profit. Coding support was provided by Ethan Sue and transcripts were collated by Lillian Skinner for The London Archive. The project team has since expanded to include contributors from Open Civics and SuperBenefit.
How does it work?
The site scrapes publicly available meeting data from London’s eScribe system, processes it into searchable formats, and uses AI (Retrieval Augmented Generation) to let you ask natural language questions about council discussions from 2011 to present.
How up-to-date is the data?
Our data is only as current as the City of London’s published minutes. The City Clerk’s office typically publishes official meeting minutes several weeks after a meeting takes place. Until the minutes are published on eScribe, we cannot extract vote breakdowns or agenda item details for that meeting.
We also process meeting transcripts and press coverage, which helps the AI chatbot answer questions about recent discussions. However, transcripts and press coverage don’t give us the official vote records — only the published minutes contain the structured vote data (who voted yea, nay, or absent on each motion).
We check for new data regularly and update the site as soon as it becomes available. If you notice a recent meeting is missing vote data, that’s almost certainly because the city hasn’t published the minutes yet — not because of an issue on our end.
Help us improve
This project is still in active development. We need your help to make it better!
- Test the site and let us know if something doesn’t work
- Report inaccuracies in meeting data or AI responses
- Suggest new features you’d like to see
Email us at info@opencouncil.xyz
Support the project
Open Council is a labour of love. Over 600 hours (and counting) have been poured into building and maintaining this project.
If you find it useful, please consider supporting the Institute for Community Sustainability: Support the Institute for Community Sustainability