I follow surveillance and policing-tech issues in New Orleans — drones, facial recognition, license plate readers. The decisions happen in council and committee meetings, but the only warning is an agenda PDF posted a few days beforehand. Miss the posting, miss the meeting.
Lots of people have this problem: journalists, advocates, anyone tracking zoning or short-term rentals. I’ve been meaning to build a system for it — I’m still working on one — but Claude Code made a working version trivial with a skill and a scheduled routine.
The skill sweeps every upcoming council and committee agenda (Legistar plus the Granicus pages committees hide on), searches them for my keywords, and checks pending legislation too. On a match it adds the meeting to my Google Calendar, pushes an alert to my phone, and summarizes what hit. On a schedule, it just runs — I only hear about it when something I care about shows up.
It’s a ~300-line Python scraper plus a SKILL.md that tells Claude what to do with the results. Writing the skill was mostly writing down the workflow I’d do by hand; Claude built the scraper — and when the city inevitably changes its website, the skill has enough notes on the data sources for Claude to fix it.
Code is here, and should adapt easily to any city on Legistar or Granicus (most are):
If you adapt it, I’d love to hear about it.
