About Board Watch

What is Board Watch?

Board Watch is an independent civic transparency project that makes Town of Hempstead Board meeting agendas searchable and understandable. We process public meeting documents so residents, journalists, and officials can quickly find what matters to them — without sifting through hundreds of PDF pages.

This project is built by an independent developer and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to the Town of Hempstead government.

How it works

Public agendas are downloaded from hempsteadny.gov, text is extracted from the PDFs, and AI generates structured summaries of each meeting's agenda items. The full text of every document is indexed and searchable through our AI-powered chat, which can answer questions across 178 meetings spanning 2018 to 2026.

The chat uses a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipeline: your question is matched against meeting documents using semantic search, and an AI model generates a grounded answer with citations back to the original source material.

Important disclaimer

AI-generated summaries and chat responses may contain errors or omissions. Always verify information against the original documents, which are linked from each meeting's page. This site does not provide legal advice and is not an official government resource.

Contact

Have feedback, corrections, or questions? Reach out at contact@builtbyjao.com.