# OpenPublica

> Open civic data: US city-council and board meetings, transcribed, summarized, and made searchable — alongside the adopted general-plan and budget documents those meetings act on. Free, public, and unauthenticated. It currently covers 39,305 meetings from 379 tracked governments across 50 states and DC.

Every meeting has a machine transcript, a structured AI summary, topics, and a link back to the government's own recording. Documents are transcribed from rendered pixels rather than the PDF text layer, so scanned tables come through as text and a page that could not be read is a marked hole, never a silent omission.

## For agents — start here

- [MCP server](https://api.openpublica.com/mcp): The best way to use this corpus. A read-only Model Context Protocol server (streamable HTTP, no auth) exposing 15 typed tools for searching meetings, reading transcripts, and citing document pages. Listed on the official MCP registry as `com.openpublica/civic-meetings`.
- [OpenAPI specification](https://api.openpublica.com/v1/openapi.json): The full REST surface as OpenAPI 3.1, if you would rather generate a client than speak MCP.
- [API reference](https://www.openpublica.com/api-docs): Prose documentation of the same endpoints, with the caveats that matter for citing figures correctly.

## Using the data honestly

- [Coverage](https://api.openpublica.com/v1/stats): Corpus totals. Note that `total_states` counts states and DC is reported separately as `includes_dc` — render the pair as "50 states and DC" rather than summing them to an ambiguous 51.
- [Document coverage](https://www.openpublica.com/api-docs): A government's empty document list carries a `coverage.state`. `not_reviewed` means OpenPublica has not looked there yet; it is not a claim that the government publishes nothing. Most tracked governments are in that state today.

## Browse

- [Recent meetings](https://www.openpublica.com/all/meetings): Every tracked government, newest first.
- [About](https://www.openpublica.com/about): What OpenPublica is, where the recordings come from, and what it deliberately does not do.

## Notes

- Please send a descriptive `User-Agent`. Requests are logged by route, status, and hashed IP so the project can report how much of its use comes from agents rather than the website; a real User-Agent is the easiest way to be counted as something better than "unknown".
- Send `Accept-Encoding: gzip`. Listings are mostly prose and compress about tenfold.
- `video_url` is null until a meeting's recording lands on the Internet Archive. `source_url` — the government's own link — is the interim fallback and is always present.
- Cite meetings by title and date, and link to the meeting's page on https://www.openpublica.com.