What it is
CocoaCivic collects the agendas, minutes and recordings of City of Cocoa public meetings and makes them searchable in one place. It tracks 1,222 meetings of 14 City boards and committees. You can browse the meetings or search the archive.
Independence
CocoaCivic is independent. It is not affiliated with the City of Cocoa, or with any candidate, political party or campaign. It is not a government site and not a news outlet. Its pages link to the City's documents and recordings so that you can check what they say.
How it works
- City documents. Agendas, agenda packets and minutes are collected from the City's meetings portal when the project's collection jobs run. There is no promised schedule, and the jobs can be paused, so this site can be behind what the City has posted.
- Recordings. Meeting recordings are transcribed by machine, with speech-recognition software on the project's own computers. Where voices could be told apart, passages carry speaker labels, also made by machine. A label such as "Speaker 4" is a voice that has not been identified.
- Meeting records. Motions, who moved and seconded them, results, ballots and the roll call are read automatically from the City's minutes. A record that could not be read reliably is withheld rather than guessed. The meeting page gives the minutes' page number where it could be read.
- Corrections. Readers can report an error. A report changes nothing by itself. The words of a transcript change in three ways. A person approves a correction, and the passage is marked "Corrected — reviewed", with the original words shown. Or a machine step re-recognizes some passages, which are marked "Machine re-recognized": where it replaced words, the original words are shown beside them, and where the first pass had no words or a repeated loop, words were added and marked. Or the recording is transcribed again.
More detail is on the methodology page.
What AI does and does not do here
- Machine transcripts are not checked word by word. Speech recognition can mishear words, names and numbers, and speaker labels can be wrong. A passage marked as corrected has been reviewed by a person. A transcript can show that something was discussed. It is not a record of a vote, an amount or an outcome.
- A language model reviews transcripts. It flags passages that look doubtful, and a flagged passage is marked on the page, never silently changed.
- A local AI chooses the records; code writes every sentence. The answer box on a search page asks an AI model that runs on the project's own computer which City records answer your question. Code then writes every sentence from the chosen records' own words and figures, each sentence ending with a footnote number that leads to the record it rests on, and checks that each record exists and holds the words of your question. No sentence in it is written by an AI. A question that asks how or whom to vote is never sent to the AI: it gets a fixed answer and the candidate lists. Nothing you type is sent to an outside AI service. When the AI is busy, takes too long or its choice does not hold up, the box shows the answer code can write from the records its own search found, or the plain list of matching records, and says so. The AI can still choose a record that does not answer your question, which is why the footnotes and the exact wording are there.
- No AI-written summary is added to a meeting's page. Meeting pages show records read from the minutes and the machine transcript.
- Articles are written by AI. The Articles page lists the articles published so far; it can be empty. An article is written by an AI entirely from the database of City of Cocoa meeting transcripts and documents, not from the opinions of the site's creators. It says so at the top of its page and is approved by the project before publication. Its statements link to the records they come from; the records, not the article, are the evidence.
What this archive does not contain
An empty search result is not proof that something did not happen. These are known gaps:
- No campaign-finance or donor data. The archive holds no contributions to candidates, political committees or donor records. Money on this site is money named in meeting records and documents.
- No city ledger or actual spending. Amounts here are amounts named at meetings. They are not the City's accounts.
- No lobbyist registrations or financial-interest filings.
- Meetings without a transcript. 699 of the 1,222 meetings tracked have no machine transcript here, so a subject missing from search may simply lack a transcript.
- Individual votes on some motions. Where the minutes record only a mover, a seconder and a result, the archive cannot show how each member voted.
The numbers
The archive currently holds:
- 1,222 public meetings tracked
- 523 meetings with a machine transcript (unverified)
- 539 recordings with a machine transcript on those meetings' pages (a meeting can have more than one recording)
- 142 other recordings with a machine transcript, shown on pages of their own and not counted as meetings
- 778 meetings with motions read from the City's minutes
- 49 meetings with only the attendance roll read from the City's minutes
- 133 meetings the City's record lists as cancelled, with no minutes record or transcript
- 4 meetings with a recording but no transcript in the archive
- 140 meetings with an agenda packet but no minutes record, recording or transcript
- 14 distinct City boards and committees
Report an error
Use the "report a problem" button beside a transcript passage, the feedback form, or email hello@cocoacivic.org with the page address and what is wrong. The corrections page says what happens to a report.
Support the project
Contributions pay for a better computer and more storage. The aim is to process new meetings sooner and to keep the whole archive online. CocoaCivic is not a registered nonprofit, and contributions are not tax-deductible. Support CocoaCivic.
Contact
For anything else, write to the same address: hello@cocoacivic.org.
Read more
- Methodology: how the records are read and checked
- Data sources: the sources the site reads from
- Known limitations: what the site withholds, what is unfinished, and where the record is thin
- Articles: written by AI only from the City records in this archive, each published after the project's written approval
- Terms of use and privacy