How CivicIndex works

CivicIndex is an index of official town records. It is not a substitute for the minutes, agendas, or recordings published by the town, and nothing here is legal advice.

Sources

• Meeting agendas, packets and minutes from the town's meeting-management system, re-checked daily so minutes are picked up when they are published, typically weeks after a meeting.
• A curated set of town website pages (permits, housing, PFAS, elections, budget), refreshed daily.
• Property parcel data from MassGIS.

Processing

• Decisions are extracted from minutes by an AI model constrained to a fixed schema: item, motion, outcome, vote counts, and a verbatim excerpt. Agendas never produce decisions; only minutes do.
• Answers on the Ask page are generated only from retrieved records. Every claim must cite a record; a second model checks the answer against the records and the confidence label reflects that check. When minutes are not yet available the answer says so.
• The weekly digest is drafted by a model and approved by a person before it is sent.

Limits

• Minutes are the town's summary of a meeting; they can be corrected or amended after publication. Check the meeting record linked from each item.
• Text extracted from scanned PDFs can contain errors. Vote counts are shown only when the minutes state them.
• AI-written articles published before September 2026 are being audited against their sources; items that fail are unpublished pending review.

Corrections

Every answer has a flag control and every page has a contact link. Reports are reviewed by a person.