How it works
Collect, transcribe, structure, score, cite.
Five steps between a town posting a meeting packet and a claim you can take to an investment committee. Every one of them is reversible: a claim in a KnowToYes report links back to the meeting it came from, so you can read the passage yourself.
The five steps
| Step | What happens | What it produces |
|---|---|---|
| 01 Collect | Municipal websites, agenda portals, document servers and video channels, on each jurisdiction's own schedule | Agendas, minutes, staff reports, audio and video |
| 02 Transcribe | Text extraction and OCR on written records; speech-to-text with speaker separation on audio and video | A readable transcript for towns that publish only a recording |
| 03 Structure | Entities pulled out and matched across every meeting where the case came up | Municipality, board, date, case, applicant, speakers, topic, action, vote |
| 04 Score | A signal level for how much a record matters to development, and a quality score | Roll calls, pledges and proclamations stay out of your results |
| 05 Cite | Every claim carries the meeting and the date it came from | A report you can check rather than trust |
Source: KnowToYes pipeline, as of 18 September 2026.
You do not have to trust a summary.
The hours in this work were never in the thinking. They were in the finding: which meetings exist, where the minutes and the video live, which ten passages out of thousands bear on your site. Once the record is structured, the finding is a search.
So the senior time goes where it always should have gone, on deciding what the record means. Pull the source passages and read them yourself. The digging is gone either way.
We test the output the hard way. A written prediction is built only from records dated before a case was filed, set aside, then graded against the real hearings. On the Lawrence Property PUD in Apex, the prediction called the outcome, the precedent cases and four of the five opposition themes. It also got one call wrong, and that miss is the most useful part of the write-up.
What we will not claim.
These limits govern every product on this site, not only the Development Application Tracker. They are stated in the same place as the claim, and they stay stated.
| We do not say | We say |
|---|---|
| Everything filed | All eligible public filings captured from the jurisdictions we cover |
| Real time | Posted to the list the day the jurisdiction publishes it |
| Every county in the state | The counties named in your agreement, and more as they go live |
| We track permits | We track development applications and board actions |
Two more, straight out. Agendas and packets reach us on each jurisdiction's own schedule, so a board item can appear a few days after the meeting was noticed. And a filing is in the record only if the jurisdiction published it, so a project still moving through pre-application conversations will not be there.
One more that matters most. KnowToYes never predicts an approval, a vote or a timeline for a public body. It describes the record, the path and the risk. The calls the record cannot make go to a person, and that is YES.