Civic Lens

Plain-English coverage of Clark County, Nevada government meetings. A free, no-account public-good tool: it reads the county's public meeting record and turns dense agendas into briefs ordinary residents can follow — what's coming up, what was decided, and how each member voted. Every summary links back to the official record and is labeled as AI-generated.

Part of the Grudged "access infrastructure" line (sibling to FirstEmbark / Open Scholarships).

Phase 1 (this build)

• Source: Clark County Legistar Web API (webapi.legistar.com/v1/clark) — public, no key.
• Bodies: Board of Commissioners, Planning Commission, Zoning Commission.
• Coverage: upcoming agendas and past outcomes (roll-call votes included).
• Summaries: Gemma 4 (MLX) writes a plain-English meeting overview + one-sentence rewrite of each agenda item. Topics are tagged deterministically (keyword vocabulary in app/topics.py).
• Map: /map plots every land-use/zoning item with a mappable location (MapLibre + OpenFreeMap tiles). Coordinates come from the free Clark County address locator (exact corners) with a township centroid fallback; data served as GeoJSON at /api/map.geojson. Per-meeting pages get a mini-map.
• Surface: server-rendered SEO pages — /, /map, /meeting/{id}, /body/{slug}, /topic/{slug}, /about, plus /sitemap.xml, /robots.txt, and JSON APIs at /api/meetings and /api/map.geojson.

Architecture

collect.py          Legistar -> civic.db (meetings, agenda_items, item_votes, topics)  [deterministic]
geocode_job.py      civic.db titles -> Clark County locator / centroids -> geocodes    [deterministic]
summarize_job.py    civic.db -> Gemma (MLX) -> overviews + plain rewrites              [best-effort]
app/                FastAPI: render.py (HTML), main.py (routes), legistar/summarize/topics/geocode/db

SQLite at DB_PATH (/data/civic.db on Arch). Summaries call MLX on the Mac (MLX_URL); if MLX is unreachable the site still renders the raw agenda — a summary outage never breaks a page.

Run (dev, on the Mac where MLX lives)

python -m venv venv && venv/bin/pip install -r requirements.txt
cp .env.example .env
DB_PATH=./civic.db venv/bin/python collect.py            # pull meetings
DB_PATH=./civic.db venv/bin/python geocode_job.py        # map coordinates (Clark County locator)
DB_PATH=./civic.db venv/bin/python summarize_job.py      # Gemma summaries (MLX on :8321)
DB_PATH=./civic.db venv/bin/uvicorn app.main:app --port 8902

Deploy (Arch)

1. Clone to /home/grudged/repos/civic-lens, create venv + pip install -r requirements.txt.
2. cp .env.example .env; set DB_PATH=/data/civic.db, PUBLIC_BASE_URL=https://<domain>, MLX_URL=http://192.168.0.79:8321 (the Mac).
3. sudo ufw allow from 192.168.0.0/24 to any port 8902
4. Install units from deploy/ (civic-lens.service + collect/summarize .service/.timer), systemctl enable --now.
5. Nginx .lan proxy + public domain as needed.

Next (phase 2)

• Topic / neighborhood email + Telegram alerts.
• CCSD School Board (BoardDocs) and City of Las Vegas (PrimeGov).
• Wire-in: knowledge compiler + training pairs, Mission Control tab, monitoring, integration-health.

Independent civic project — not affiliated with or endorsed by Clark County.