Seattle Councilmatic

Live site: www.seattlecouncilmatic.org

Seattle Councilmatic is a civic-engagement web app that makes Seattle City Council activity legible to residents. It tracks legislation, meetings, councilmembers' voting records, and the Seattle Municipal Code in one place, with plain-language summaries on every bill and SMC section.

It's a fork/extension of the Councilmatic platform (DataMade) layered with a custom REST API, a React SPA, and a Seattle-specific data pipeline (Legistar scrapers + an SMC parser + LLM summary jobs).

What's in the site

• Legislation — every bill, resolution, and ordinance from Legistar with full text, sponsors, actions, and roll-call votes. Plain-language summaries for current bills.
• Meetings — committee and council agendas, attached documents, locations, video links.
• Council members — each rep's district, committees, tenure, and a unified table of every bill they sponsored or voted on (sortable, filterable, paginated).
• Municipal Code — the full SMC parsed from the official PDF, with subchapter navigation, body text, plain-language section summaries, and cross-references between sections / RCW citations / linked legislation.
• Search across legislation, meetings, and SMC sections.

Architecture in one paragraph

Daily cron scrapes Legistar (pupa update seattle) into Open Civic Data tables (opencivicdata_*); a sync step copies into Councilmatic's extended tables (councilmatic_core_*). The SMC PDF is parsed offline into structured MunicipalCodeSection rows with regex + heuristics. LLM summaries (Anthropic Claude) run in batched jobs over both legislation text and SMC sections. Django serves a JSON REST API (/api/...) backed by Postgres + PostGIS; a Vite-built React SPA owns every non-admin route and consumes that API. Django admin (/admin/) and Wagtail CMS (/cms/) remain server-rendered for editorial workflows.

For the deeper version see ARCHITECTURE.md. For the production runbook see DEPLOY.md. For an accessibility-conventions reference see AUDIT_FINDINGS.md.

Local development

Prereqs: Docker + Docker Compose v2, an Anthropic API key (only required if you want to regenerate summaries locally — the site renders fine without it).

git clone https://github.com/SeattleCouncilmatic/seattle-councilmatic.git
cd seattle-councilmatic
cp .env.example .env          # fill in DJANGO_SECRET_KEY at minimum
docker compose up --build     # first build is ~2-3 min

Once containers are healthy:

• Django + REST API: http://localhost:8000
• Vite SPA (with HMR): http://localhost:5173 — preferred for frontend iteration; routes proxy /api/... and /admin/ back to Django.
• Django admin: http://localhost:8000/admin/ — create a superuser with docker compose exec app python manage.py createsuperuser.

To populate the database with real data, run the daily scrape once:

docker compose exec scheduler sh /app/scripts/update_seattle.sh

This pulls the last ~18 months of Legistar data; first run is slow (10-30 min), subsequent runs are incremental.

Acknowledgments

Built on:

• Councilmatic by DataMade — the core framework for tracking local legislation
• django-councilmatic — Django models for legislation, events, members
• Open Civic Data — schemas for civic data
• Pupa — scraping framework
• pdfplumber — SMC PDF extraction
• Anthropic Claude — plain-language summaries
• React + Vite — SPA frontend
• Leaflet — interactive maps

Data sources:

• Seattle City Council
• Seattle Legistar
• Seattle Municipal Code (PDF) (linked from every SMC page)

Map tiles:

• Basemap tiles by CARTO (Voyager raster), under CC BY 3.0
• Map data from OpenStreetMap contributors, under ODbL

License

Released under the MIT License.