Methodology
How OpenSouthCarolina sources, transcribes, enriches, and indexes public meeting records.
What we hold for Charleston
These are coverage figures — how much of the public record we have published. They are not an accuracy measure, and we do not currently publish one.
- Meetings
- 384
- Bodies covered
- 34
- Earliest record
- January 5, 2026
- Latest meeting
- November 12, 2026
Minutes are published on the body's own schedule, often weeks after the meeting.
526 published motions. A decision can only be extracted where minutes exist.
Next scheduled meeting on record: November 16, 2026.
Known source problems
- November 12, 2026 · Technical Review Committee — No recording — video URL serves a web page, not media (no resolver for it). Download returned an HTML page (text/html), not media — the video URL points at a we
- November 5, 2026 · Technical Review Committee — No recording found within the 7-day media watch
- November 5, 2026 · Keep Charleston Beautiful — No recording found within the 7-day media watch
- November 5, 2026 · Resilience & Sustainability Advisory Committee — No recording found within the 7-day media watch
- November 4, 2026 · Ad Hoc Budget Advisory Committee — No recording found within the 7-day media watch
- November 4, 2026 · Board of Zoning Appeals Site Design — No recording found within the 7-day media watch
- November 3, 2026 · Board of Zoning Appeals Zoning — No recording found within the 7-day media watch
- October 28, 2026 · Special Events Committee — No recording found within the 7-day media watch
- October 28, 2026 · Ad Hoc Budget Advisory Committee — No recording found within the 7-day media watch
- October 22, 2026 · Redevelopment and Preservation Commission — No recording found within the 7-day media watch
Bodies covered (34)
Accommodations Tax Advisory Committee · Ad Hoc Budget Advisory Committee · Ad Hoc Rules Advisory Committee · Audit Committee · Board of Architectural Review · Board of Zoning Appeals Site Design · Board of Zoning Appeals Zoning · Building Codes Board of Appeals · Charleston Basin Flood Action Committee · City Council · City of Charleston Public Facilities Corporation · Colonial Common and Ashley River Embankment Commission · Commission on Disability Issues · Commission on History · Commission on Women · Commission on the Arts · Community Development · Design Review Board · Health and Wellness Advisory Committee · Human Resources Committee · Keep Charleston Beautiful · Livability Review Board · Planning Commission · Public Safety Committee · Public Works and Utilities Committee · Recreation Commission · Recreation Committee · Redevelopment and Preservation Commission · Resilience & Sustainability Advisory Committee · Special Events Committee · Special Facilities · Technical Review Committee · Tourism Commission · Traffic and Transportation Committee
Where the records come from
We pull official meeting videos from city platforms — Granicus, CivicPlus, PrimeGov, Swagit, and YouTube — once per city per day. Agendas come from the city's public agenda system. Nothing is republished without an official source.
How transcription works
Every meeting is transcribed with word-level timestamps, then enriched with AI to extract decisions, agenda items, public comments, and civic issues. Transcripts may contain errors; video and original audio remain the authoritative source.
How search works
Search is hybrid — keyword matching plus vector similarity — inside Meilisearch. Results are real records (meetings, agenda items, dev applications). The summaries on each result card were produced during enrichment and are reviewed periodically. Written answers come only from the assistant, described next.
How the assistant answers questions
The “Ask about” assistant answers plain-English questions from the same records search uses: agendas, minutes, transcripts, recorded decisions and development applications. It does not answer from general knowledge about your city. It is free with a sign-in.
Every statement in an answer links to the meeting it came from, so you can open the agenda, minutes or the moment in the video and check it yourself. When the records do not cover a question, it says so instead of guessing.
It keeps a recommendation separate from a decision. A planning commission that votes to recommend denial has not denied anything; the council decides next, and the answer says which body acted and which body acts next.
Known limits. Until a body approves its minutes, a vote may be known only from the recording; answers label those votes as recording-based. Not every meeting has a transcript or minutes yet, and coverage differs by city (see the coverage figures at the top of this page). Like the summaries, answers can contain errors.
Before a change to the assistant ships, we rerun a fixed set of real residents' questions with checked answers and compare the results. Passing that set does not guarantee every answer is right, which is why every answer shows its sources.
AI limitations
AI summaries can contain errors. Always verify legal actions, vote counts, and named-person attributions against the official video, transcript, and minutes. Where records are incomplete, we mark the gap rather than guess.
Corrections
Spotted a problem? Email corrections@opencityrecord.org with a link to the page and a description of the issue. We review every correction and update the affected record.