The open dataset

Explore the data interactively →

Filter, facet, full-text search, and run your own SQL across the whole corpus — the meetings, roll-call votes, government payments, and campaign-finance records we hold — then export any result as CSV or JSON. No download required. research.theboringparts.com

Everything on this site is built from public records, so the database itself is public too. One SQLite file: every municipality we track, every meeting record we have collected, the plain-English briefs, the decisions extracted from minutes (vote tallies, dollar amounts), translations, and the weekly roundups. Free for research, journalism, apps, or training — attribution required.

What this dataset is not. It is not every local-government meeting in the US and Canada, and it is not a random or representative sample of them. It is what we could collect from the portals each government chose to publish on: deepest where a city runs a structured records platform, thin in small towns that post a PDF to a webpage, and absent where no portal exists or where we have not written an adapter yet. Several layers — permits, licences, roll-call votes, campaign finance — are first-run rather than exhaustive and cover only the publishers named in their own columns. Treat every count here as a floor on what exists, never a total. Per-place coverage, current or stale, is listed on the coverage page.

Download mytown.db.gz (16262.5 MB gzipped SQLite, updated 2026-08-20, refreshed daily)

Tables

municipalities — id, slug, name, state/province, country, source platform
meetings — muni_id, body name, date/time, location, agenda / minutes / video URLs, archived_pdf_key
briefs — AI plain-English agenda summaries: headline, summary, notable_items, tags
decisions — what actually passed or failed, from official minutes, with vote tallies
briefs_i18n — Spanish and French translations of briefs
roundups — weekly newspaper-style town roundups (markdown)
census_demographics — US Census ACS 5-year: population, median/per-capita income, median home value, housing units, per municipality

That's a partial list — see the full column-level schema (every table, column, type, key and row count, plus example queries), or grab schema.md. To enumerate every jurisdiction programmatically, use the municipalities.json discovery endpoint.

Archived documents

We mirror the agenda documents we process to our own storage — 1,751,419 so far, which is most but not all of them; a document the portal removed before we reached it was never archived. A meeting's archived_pdf_key resolves to https://archive.theboringparts.com/<key> — the documents stay available even after a city purges its portal.

License

CC BY 4.0. Use it for anything; credit "MyTown / theboringparts.com" with a link. Summaries are AI-generated from official documents — verify against the linked primary source before you rely on a detail.

Citing this dataset

Using MyTown in research or reporting? Please cite it (attribution is also what the license asks for). The dataset uses calendar versioning (YYYY.MM); citing a specific release keeps your results reproducible.

Current release: v2026.08 · DOI: 10.57967/hf/9676

@misc{greene_mytown_2026,
  author    = {Greene, Jacob},
  title     = {MyTown: an open corpus of US and Canadian local-government
               meetings, decisions, and roll-call votes},
  year      = {2026},
  version   = {2026.08},
  doi       = {10.57967/hf/9676},
  publisher = {Hugging Face},
  url       = {https://huggingface.co/datasets/jazzypajamas/mytown-local-gov-meetings}
}

Inline: Greene, J. (2026). MyTown: an open corpus of US and Canadian local-government meetings, decisions, and roll-call votes (v2026.08). mytown.theboringparts.com