What this is
Every weekday, Los Angeles governments file motions, award contracts, settle lawsuits, issue permits and take votes. Almost all of it is public, and almost none of it is read. Countywide reads the record and publishes it in plain language, one entry per government action, each linked to the document it came from. The point is not to tell you what to think about City Hall. It is to make what City Hall did findable the day it happened.
What we cover
Today: the Los Angeles City Council and its committees (council files, motions, reports, roll-call votes), the County Board of Supervisors (board letters, motions, the statement of proceedings), the Metro board, filings in the federal court for the Central District of California, and the city councils whose agenda systems are connected so far (each city's page says whether its council is covered). The aim is everything inside Los Angeles County, all 88 cities. Coverage is listed honestly: if a body is not on this list, we do not cover it yet.
How it is made
A pipeline collects the records each morning, fetches the primary document for each one and extracts its text, and ranks them by a published formula: what is at stake, how unusual the action is, how time-sensitive it is, how well it is documented, and how clearly it can be explained. A language model then drafts a headline and a short summary from the document, under rules that are checked by code: headlines describe, numbers and names must appear in the document, and no words of judgment. Entries publish without a person reading each one first, and every entry says so. When the editor has read and approved an entry, it says that instead.
Images are a map of the place the record is about, a photograph from Wikimedia Commons with its license and author credited, or the first page of the document. Nothing on this site is generated imagery.
Who makes it
Countywide is made by Tomás Sidenfaden, who also publishes commentary about Los Angeles government elsewhere. The record here is kept separate from that commentary: entries describe what a document says, and where a video is attached to an entry it is labeled as commentary. The editorial rules are written down on the standards page, and every correction is logged publicly on the corrections page.
Get in touch
To report an error in an entry, use the form on its page or on the corrections page, so it is tied to the record. For anything else, this form reaches the editor.