I’m glad to see you found your way here, let me show you how to get the most out of this website. There are 2 primary points of interest, one is committee meeting analysis, and the other is bill analysis. Bill analysis will be provided shortly, for now let’s focus on committee meetings.
Committee Meetings
The short summary is that all Minnesota legislature committee meetings are transcribed and processed, available here:
The longer explanation is that all committee meetings, including Floor sessions and Joint meetings, are transcribed and processed to determine which legislators spoke during the meeting and when. Which bills are related to the meeting are determined and provided, supplemental links are included, and keywords are searched throughout the entirety of the meeting to gauge moments of interest. All timestamps are linked to the exact moment it pertains to within the meeting video.
So how does this help me?
The Minnesota Legislature has accelerated the creation of bills, especially controversial bills, at a rate in which a normal Minnesotan couldn’t possibly keep up with. This site will provide a way to very rapidly get an understanding of meeting contents, speakers, bill advocates (or opposition), and moments of ideological discussion in the form of keyword searches. It also includes information to contact legislators and district information.
Example Please?
Here’s how to look more into, say, the House Education Policy Committee’s meeting on 2/21/2023, for example. All meetings for all House committees is available here:
http://www.mnlegislature.com/legislature/House/
Select the committee you’d like to browse the meetings for:
Find the date of the meeting you’d like to view, and select it:
At the top you will find a link to the video source as well as an audio link if available. Bills will be listed, in this case HF1875 (bill links are often available in the “Links to Meeting Related Content” section). The primary content is a list of every committee member’s name and information, followed by when they are called upon or referenced during the meeting (if at all). In this example, representative Laurie Pryor’s name is mentioned twice at the listed timestamps. Click the link and it will take you to the exact moment in the video where her name was spoken.
The section, “Noteworthy Content” is the results of a keyword search through the meeting, grabbing sentences containing words that match, as well as a direct link to the video where that word/sentence was spoken, example below:
Lastly, the section “Links to Meeting Related Content” is an aggregate of functional links that were shared for that particular meeting:
When can I see a new meeting?
It may take several days to process a particular meeting (video isn’t always uploaded immediately), but results should be available relatively quickly. The wealth of aggregated data here is quite extensive and I hope you find it as useful as I have. I will try to post updates and keep you all informed as this project continues to grow.
Suggestions & Feedback?
Comments are enabled on this site, otherwise you can contact me at grokked@proton.com