San Ramon Resident Helps Community Decode Local Civic Meetings

SAN RAMON, CA — Every week, scores of residents around the Tri-Valley attend local city council, planning commission, and school board meetings to voice their opinions on matters of vital importance to the community. However, unless you’re willing to attend or watch meetings that can last up to five hours, you may not know what was said or accomplished.

San Ramon resident and 2024 mayoral candidate Chirag Kathrani hopes to change this through a new project called the Open Governance Initiative, which provides AI-generated summaries and transcripts of local political meetings.

“City websites are often hard to navigate, and meetings can be hours long,” said Kathrani, who is managing the project through his Lead For Earth nonprofit. “Our platform offers clear, AI-generated minutes and extracts top public concerns using sentiment analysis. The goal is unfiltered, unbiased, and easily accessible civic information.”

The Opgov.ai website currently features summaries, key takeaways and actions, full videos, full transcriptions, and speaker comments, with names included. It also offers a collection of written comments emailed to the city. Breakdowns are currently offered for a total of 129 council, planning commission and council meetings all over the Tri-Valley and East Bay going back to January 2023.

These breakdowns are organized by a team of 40 high school volunteers, who upload and refine meeting content, and gain experience and knowledge in both local civics and AI engineering. Recently, Marketing Director and Emerald High School student Sathya Ganesan spoke at the San Ramon and Dublin city council meetings about the necessity of the Open Governance Initiative.

“Our plan and platform…makes it easier and empowers more residents to stay involved, get involved, and feel heard,” he said at a July 15 Dublin City Council meeting.
The community is invited to look through meeting summaries, and add their own feedback and summaries.

“We don’t view ourselves as replacing traditional reporting or government communication—far from it. We see our role as a civic translator: making public information more navigable, inclusive, and meaningful for the people who rely on it,” Kathrani said. “Our mission is rooted in a core belief: Democracy is local. When residents can clearly see how decisions are made—when they can trace a budget vote back to a community concern, or follow a development plan from its first public comment—they’re not just more informed. They’re more empowered to participate, to lead, and even to consider public service themselves.”