This project is a working toolkit for preparing for and reviewing Town Meeting. It is designed around official source material only: Massachusetts law, Town Meeting Time, the applicable town charter and bylaws, and official town-published warrant, motion, recommendation, presentation, minutes, and action materials.
The initial test town is Natick, Massachusetts. Meeting artifacts are stored by Town Meeting instance using short folder names such as:
SATM 2026for Spring Annual Town Meeting 2026FATM 2025for Fall Annual Town Meeting 2025STM 2024for Special Town Meeting 2024
For each warrant article, the toolkit should produce a moderator-facing brief that includes:
- Article identifier, title, sponsor, and official source links.
- Plain-language summary of the article and what Town Meeting is being asked to do.
- Related motions, substitute motions, procedural motions, amendments, and sponsor materials.
- Finance Committee recommendation, vote status, discussion highlights, and summarized arguments for and against when an official recommendation book is available.
- Notes for floor management, including likely amendments, vote thresholds, conflicts, special rules, and questions the moderator may need to resolve.
The toolkit must distinguish official sources from background material. Article summaries and recommendations should be based only on official sources listed in the meeting source manifest.
See official source policy and the article brief template.
Missing official sources that require manual acquisition are tracked in TODO.
Town Meeting Time source tracking:
Natick historical research:
The Natick history files are a town-specific example built from a read-only body of past moderator and Finance Committee working files. Other towns should provide their own comparable evidence set before the toolkit generates prior-practice, tradition, or decorum examples for that town.
The current command-line workflow can:
- Build a source manifest from an official Natick Town Meeting page.
- Archive selected official source documents with checksums.
- Extract text from archived warrant and Finance Committee PDFs.
- Parse warrant articles into structured JSON.
- Generate draft article briefs.
- Generate per-meeting moderator HTML reports with overview, preparation, article, and source-traceability sections.
- Build Natick-specific historical research notes from read-only past meeting working files.
- Generate public-safe historical synthesis and answer prototype moderator questions from that synthesis.
See current workflow.
See roadmap for the prioritized feature list.