MyHamlet.com is a fascinating public records platform that monitors, transcribes, and indexes municipal and county government meetings across the US. Its primary job is to take unstructured and fragmented public data (such as meeting minutes and video recordings of council meetings) and turn it into searchable data for advocacy groups, real estate developers, and others.
The site covers over 2,400 cities and counties, and it allows you to easily uncover hard-to-ascertain data like public opinion on data centres:
Okay, you knew this already. But their other rankings include topics ranging from pickleball courts to missing middle housing (both of which seem to have broad support):
While it’s a great way to surface data that most people wouldn’t care to read otherwise, it naturally inherits the same structural bias of the public meeting format. In other words, the people who tend to engage and attend these meetings typically have both the time on their hands and a bone to pick. There need to be better ways to capture an accurate cross-section of public opinion.
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