The meeting desk your newsroom didn’t know it could afford

City councils, planning commissions, boards of supervisors, school boards — the stuff that matters often shows up on an agenda a week before a vote. A desk reporter would catch it. Most teams don’t have a desk reporter.

This one is on the desk every weekday morning.

What it does

• Crawls the meeting portals your team watches (SF Board of Supervisors, SF Planning Commission, SFMTA — plus any town, port, or district site you add).
• Pulls agendas, minutes, and supporting documents as they’re posted.
• Summarizes each meeting into a short brief — what’s being decided, who’s sponsoring it, what the staff recommendation is.
• Flags items that match what your team told it to care about: zoning, procurement, specific contractors, named officials, keywords.
• Sends the right brief to the right editor — not a firehose.

The reveal

A planning commission posts an agenda Thursday night. Friday morning, your editor has a two-paragraph summary of the three items worth covering and links to the supporting PDFs — already in their inbox, already triaged by topic.

What it doesn’t do

No editorial opinion. No speculation about how a vote will go. It tells you what’s on the agenda and what the documents actually say; your team decides what’s worth writing about.

Configuration

• Watched portals: list of URLs to crawl. Team members add and remove.
• Topics of interest: keywords, neighborhoods, or named entities that trigger a findings alert.
• Digest schedule: when and to whom the weekly summary goes.

Triggers

Runs on a weekday morning cron by default — every watched portal, every morning. Teams can also run it ad hoc: “catch me up on Planning Commission since last Tuesday.”