About

Most of America’s local government is small. These communities decide on roads, water, policing, parks and taxes every month, usually with no reporter in the room and with the record scattered across agendas, PDFs and video. Another 15,700 towns and townships govern at the same scale.

We started in the Village of Shorewood Hills, Wisconsin, home to 2,155 people. As of October 28, 2026, we hold 112,260 records for the village, and across all 30 villages we hold 2,841,738 records, representing 404,151 residents. Every meeting is recorded, transcribed and its speakers identified; its motions, votes and public comments are drawn out and checked against the village's agendas, packets and minutes. Budgets, spending, ordinances, notices, safety and election data are gathered alongside and linked back to their sources. What we build here is meant to serve every one of those communities.

A community that decides with better information becomes safer, healthier and more prosperous, and accelerates its own progress. Technology has changed how companies run, how doctors treat and how people move through their day; it has barely touched the place where most of us actually live.

The meeting records on this site, the transcripts, speaker labels, summaries, and the motions and votes, are built from the village's recordings and documents and checked against the village's agendas, packets, and approved minutes. A record can still mishear a name, attach a remark to the wrong speaker, or miss a nuance a person in the room would catch, which is why every record links back to the video and the village's documents. If you find an error or an omission, send the meeting date and a timestamp or page number to hello@villagerecord.org and the record will be corrected.

Dane County's records on this site and in Ask the Village, the County Board and committee meetings, the County Clerk's election results, the adopted budgets and the county's parcel, land use, flood, wetland and shoreland maps, are used with the county's written permission. Each is credited to Dane County with a link to its page, and none is an official Dane County record. The county's map data carries its own notice: "This map does not represent a field survey and should be used for general cartographic and reference purposes only." The county or anyone named can ask for a correction or removal at hello@villagerecord.org.

If you have documents or data about the village that belong on the record, such as old minutes, newsletters, photographs, maps or records you received through an open records request, send them to hello@villagerecord.org as well.

The Village Record Project was started by Kurt Roots, a Shorewood Hills resident who has built machine learning models and led data science teams in New York, Silicon Valley, and Cambridge, Massachusetts. He is an advocate for population health and for improving health outcomes at the scale of whole communities, and this site turns that experience toward the public record of his own village, where safety, health, and progress are decided one meeting at a time. Questions, comments, or interested in getting involved: kurt@villagerecord.org.