Boulder Politics

How this site works

Boulder Politics follows three elected bodies: the BVSD Board of Education, the Boulder City Council, and the Boulder County Commissioners. It has 195 meetings and 697 votes on file, back to 2025-09-23. The data is refreshed weekly.

Where the data comes from

Official and unofficial votes

A vote marked passed or failed with no other mark comes from the body's own record: BoardDocs for BVSD, the published minutes for the county. A vote with the unofficial mark was read from the meeting's auto-generated captions by a language model. It is usually right about the outcome and the tally, and sometimes wrong about who moved a motion or how a member voted when the chair did not read the roll. When minutes arrive, the official record replaces the transcript reading.

Transcripts and summaries

Transcripts are YouTube's auto-captions (BVSD, city) or the caption track in the county's video stream. Captions carry no speaker names and misspell most proper nouns. The summaries, topic conversations, and weekly updates are written by Claude, a language model, from those captions plus the agenda. They are a guide to the recording, not a substitute for it. Every conversation links to the moment in the video it describes.

Data for agents and developers

Everything on this site is also published as static files that anyone, or any AI agent, can read without a key. Start at /llms.txt, which lists every file and the caveats to carry when citing them. The main ones are meetings, votes, members, and topics as JSON, and each transcript as plain text. Each vote says whether it is official, and each record links to its original source.

Members

Rosters are kept by hand from each body's website. Term dates are approximate to the year.

Who

Dan Hopkins, a Boulder parent who has spent too many evenings watching these meetings. Corrections are welcome.