Method and accuracy

How Council Record turns a council meeting into a briefing, what we check before publishing, and where it can still be wrong.

Who runs it

Council Record is built and published by Seattle Digital Commons ↗, a Seattle civic technology group. It is not affiliated with the City of Seattle or the Seattle City Council.

Sources

• Video and captions. Meeting video and its caption track from Seattle Channel ↗. The captions are the transcript. We number every line and keep its timestamp.
• Council directory. Member names, districts, roles and portraits from the City of Seattle's public council pages. District boundaries from City of Seattle GIS.
• Budget figures. Department budgets from Seattle Open Data ↗, shown with the date we retrieved them.

How a briefing is written

1. The caption file is saved, hashed and split into numbered lines, such as L03964.
2. An AI model (the current briefing used claude-opus-5-5) reads the whole transcript and drafts a headline, an overview and records. Every record must list the caption line numbers it relies on.
3. A second, smaller model adds capitalization and punctuation to the captions for reading. Software then checks that the readable text matches the original word for word. If it doesn't, we show the original captions.
4. Quotes are expanded to whole sentences from the cited lines. Short video clips are cut from the official video at those timestamps only when their checksums verify.

What we check before publishing

• Cited line numbers are matched against the transcript. Every record needs at least one valid citation, and at least 98% of all citations must match. In the current briefing, 108 of 108 match.
• The briefing was made from the same version of the transcript that we publish (matching hash and line count).
• If a source review finds factual errors, the briefing is withheld and only the transcript is shown.

Known limits

• Captions contain errors. They are produced for broadcast, often live. Names, numbers and technical terms are the most likely to be wrong. Each briefing lists the ones it noticed.
• Speakers aren't labeled. The captions don't say who is talking, so some statements are attributed by role.
• Summaries choose what to stress. A correct citation doesn't guarantee a fair emphasis. Read the passage when it matters.
• Absence isn't evidence. If search finds nothing, the words may have been mis-captioned or the meeting may not be published yet.
• Coverage is narrow. We currently publish one meeting: the Select Budget Committee on September 29, 2026.

Corrections

If a briefing gets something wrong, the transcript line it cites is the quickest way to show it. Tell Seattle Digital Commons ↗. A corrected briefing goes through the same citation checks. The source captions are never edited.