Published · September 18, 2026
Introducing Civic Gallery
A short introduction to what Civic Gallery does, the three public bodies it covers, and what this site is for.
Public bodies in and around San José publish their meeting records online: agendas, staff reports, memoranda, attachments. The records are public. Working with them is still harder than it should be. Someone asking a simple question about a pavement maintenance report has to find the right meeting, find the right agenda item, open the right PDF, and hope the document is searchable.
Civic Gallery is a website that does the collecting part. For each public body it covers, it gathers meetings, agenda items, matters, and attachments into one searchable place, and it keeps a link to the official record next to everything it shows.
What a gallery shows
Each gallery organizes its records in the same three layers, and the layers are not equally trustworthy:
- Official records. Meeting dates, agenda items, matters, and file names, imported from the public source system. These are the facts of what was filed.
- Extracted text. Text lifted out of public files so the documents can be searched. Extraction can make mistakes, so the source file, not the extracted text, is the record.
- Generated assistance. Summaries and theme labels produced by a model, clearly labeled as such. They can help with orientation, they can be incomplete, and they can be wrong.
A generated summary is never an official finding. If a claim matters, the linked official document is the thing to check.
Three galleries, three record systems
Civic Gallery currently covers three public bodies, each with its own site:
- San José City Government, importing from Legistar
- Santa Clara County, covering the Board of Supervisors
- San José Unified School District, importing board records from Simbli
Each gallery is a separate site with its own records. The three bodies publish through different systems, so the galleries share a structure but not a combined dataset. Records should not be mixed across hosts without saying so, and each gallery links back to the official source for everything it carries. If you want to know how fresh or complete a gallery’s imports are, each site has a Data Health page that says so plainly, for example San José’s.
What Civic Gallery is not
It is not an official record, and it is not a replacement for a public body’s own website. It is a reading and finding layer on top of records that already belong to the public. When something here disagrees with the official source, the official source wins.
Why it exists
The purpose is narrow: make it easier to get from a question to the record, the passage, and the source needed to check it. Public records only matter as much as people can actually use them, and most of the work of using them is currently spent on finding things rather than reading them. Civic Gallery tries to move that balance.
About this site
This is Civic Gallery Notes, the publication companion to the galleries. We will post feature announcements, practical guides, and short notes about how the site is built and where its limits are. The project is independent and open source, and the code is on GitHub.