About MMWatch

Local government is unusually easy to influence and unusually hard to follow. MMWatch exists to close that gap for the Marinette–Menominee area.

The problem

Decisions that shape the area — budgets, utility rates, surveillance contracts, land use — are made in meetings that are technically public and practically invisible. Notices run once in the paper. Agendas post a few days ahead, often as scanned PDFs no search engine can read. By the time something is reported, the vote has happened.

What this site does

• Reads public notices and agenda portals every day.
• Extracts the date, time, place and subject matter of every meeting.
• Publishes them as a website, a calendar feed, and open data.
• Keeps the documents, so the record stays searchable after portals rotate them out.

How it is built

Detection is deterministic: the site is generated by a program that diffs what is newly published against what it has already seen. No language model decides what matters and nothing is paraphrased — every listing links to its source so you can check it.

Limits you should know about

• Coverage is not complete. If a body does not publish a notice or agenda, we cannot list it. Absence here is not proof of absence.
• Some agendas are scanned images. We read those with OCR, which is imperfect — figures on shaded or highlighted backgrounds can drop out.
• Notices change. Meetings are moved and cancelled after publication. Confirm with the clerk before you travel.

Corrections

If a listing here is wrong, we want to know — errors in a transparency project are worse than errors elsewhere. Corrections are made promptly and the source link lets you show us exactly what we got wrong.