Three Bay Area students, including two from Los Altos, recently launched a website that uses AI to summarize local government meeting agendas and decisions.
Twin brothers Patrick Zhang and Samuel Zhang of Los Altos High School, along with fellow senior Ruiwen Ge of Aragon High School, are the creators of SimpleCity. The founders said their goal is to make meeting-related information provided by local governments more understandable and accessible to residents.
SimpleCity summarizes agendas and decisions for government meetings for the cities of Los Altos, Mountain View, Menlo Park, San Mateo, Foster City and San Francisco, as well as the counties of Santa Clara and San Mateo.
Ge said they hope to expand to other jurisdictions in the Bay Area and beyond.
The three founders said they came up with the idea for SimpleCity in May after deciding they wanted to build something together in the summer to put their free time to good use. Their website went up by the end of that month.
“One of the lessons that we learned is something that might look so simple can actually be beneficial to the community,” Samuel said. “We can use all these free resources that are available to us and I just think that it’s very important to use that to your advantage and try to make change in your community or in the world.”
Ge said the site is automatically updated every day, collecting agenda documents from official government sites and then breaking them down into pieces so that the AI tool can summarize it. To increase transparency, Patrick said these AI summaries always include a link back to the original source and the tool removes information flagged as potentially unreliable.
When the three first started building the site, Ge said their primary focus was making sure the backend worked well and could complete the site’s main goals of parsing the city council agendas and then summarizing them. However, they also wanted a visually appealing interface.
“We really care about the user experience because we want this to be a platform that people constantly access,” Patrick said. “So, if we didn’t have the right user interface for that, the platform wouldn’t have caught their attention or kept them on the site.”
Currently, SimpleCity has analyzed more than 200 meetings throughout seven jurisdictions, according to Ge. Since the platform is always seeking points of growth from its users, he said even those who do not live in the reported jurisdictions are encouraged to try the website and share their feedback. Ge added that he and his fellow founders have reached out to Bay Area residents through online platforms Nextdoor and Reddit for suggestions to better serve SimpleCity users.
“We’ve reached out to a lot of communities, we’ve made several posts, and thankfully we’ve gotten a lot of encouraging comments and also some feedback,” Ge said. “Some of the feedback we’ve received was really helpful, so I think it’s really amazing how the community’s been reaching out and we’ve been listening to their advice.”
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For more information, see simplecity.app.
