About and methodology

OpenGloucester is an independent, read-only site. It publishes public data about the City of Gloucester, Massachusetts, and does not accept reports, comments, or accounts.

Principles

• Every number and every summary links to its source.
• Text written by software is labeled as AI-generated.
• The site reports figures without commentary.
• Corrections are shown on the page, not made silently.
• History is kept. When the city replaces or removes a document, the earlier version stays available here.

Data sources

Sources are listed here as each section goes live, with a link to the original data and its license.

• 311 requests: public service requests from SeeClickFix. Data from seeclickfix.com (opens in new tab), used under the Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0 (opens in new tab) license. Private requests are not available and are not counted.
• Meetings: the City of Gloucester calendar (opens in new tab) and the agendas attached to each meeting, which the city stores in its Archive Center (opens in new tab). Entries that are not meetings of a public body, such as community events, are left out. Each agenda is saved when it is first posted, and later versions are saved alongside it.
• Ward boundaries: MassGIS, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts' geographic information office.

Metric definitions, including how each request status is counted, will be published here before the figures that use them.

Update schedule

An automated job collects new data once a day and rebuilds the site. The date at the bottom of every page shows the last update.

AI-generated summaries

Meeting previews and readable agenda text are written by an AI language model (claude-haiku-4-5, made by Anthropic) from the agenda the city posted. The city posts most agendas as scanned images, so this text also makes them usable with screen readers and search.

• Each preview is labeled as AI-generated, links to the original document, and shows which model wrote it and when.
• The model is instructed to use only what the document says, without opinions or predictions.
• Previews are not reviewed by a person before they are published. The original document is the authoritative source.
• A document is processed once. If the city posts a revised agenda, a new preview is written from it.

Corrections

If a figure or summary is wrong, please report it. Confirmed errors are fixed and a correction note is added to the affected page, stating what changed and when.

Contact

To report an error or ask a question, open an issue on the project's public issue tracker (opens in new tab).