Open source

Citizen Copilot — your analyst that watches your government and remembers

Not an app. A portable set of instructions you drop into any AI assistant with memory and scheduled tasks. It becomes your civic analyst — it knows your city, your interests, your values — and turns the firehose of government activity into one small, sourced weekly briefing.

Set up in five minutes — just ask

Create a project in your assistant and paste this. Each week you get a briefing; over months, its memory turns it into an institutional historian for your town.

https://github.com/shaelsrv/citizen-copilot Help me use this
Open on GitHub ↗

A paid AI plan may be required for memory and scheduled tasks. Learn more

01Paste the repo link into a new project in your assistant and say “Help me use this.”
02Answer its short interview — your location, interests, and values — and approve the weekly tasks you want.
03Read one briefing a week. The assistant’s memory does the compounding.

It shifts the parameters

Foundation 03 · Parameters

Whether a citizen can actually hold power to account is a fine-tuned system: it depends on how long you can pay attention, how much you can remember, how deep you can trace a decision. For most of history those dials were fixed by human limits. An emergent tool moves them.

Four dials of civic capacity
P·01
Memory horizon
Years. Open promises, leadership changes, and trends persist across weeks.
P·02
Rate of change you can see
Gradual change surfaced weekly — what’s quietly getting better or worse.
P·03
Cost of staying informed
One short, sourced weekly briefing, weighted to your interests.
P·04
Who sets your agenda
Your interests and your ground rules — facts labeled, no persuasion.
The dials it never moves: it won’t recommend candidates, won’t tell you how to vote, and always separates fact from opinion. The judgment stays yours.

Small tasks, four layers

Choose the tasks that matter to you for being informed
Observation “What happened, and who’s in charge?”
01Weekly News
04Upcoming Decisions
08Positive Developments
09Institutional Memory
Accountability “What promises are still open?”
02Accountability Tracker
06Follow-up Tracker
10Why This Matters
13Questions to Research
Systems “What is slowly changing?”
03Trend Watch
07Emerging Issues
11Cross Connections
14Compare Over Time
Memory “What did I think at the time?”
05My Personal Notes
12Civic Knowledge Graph
15Personal Civic Profile

Start with the highest-value trio: Weekly News (1), Upcoming Decisions (4), Why This Matters (10).

What no news feed gives you

Memory at work · sample excerpts

Anyone can tell you what happened this week. This is the parameter shift: multi-year trends in your own government, one story assembled from sources that never cite each other, a decision traced from national to your street — every item dated, cited, facts labeled as facts.

Task 03Weekly
Trend Watch
“What is slowly changing?”
Local · 4-year trendWeek 212
Water rates: fourth consecutive annual increase — +31% cumulative since 2022, while the utility’s maintenance backlog grew each year. No single hike made the news.
Sources: utility budgets 2022–26, rate ordinances
Local · DriftOngoing
Average building-permit approval time has slid from 3 weeks to 9 since the department lost a third of its staff. Tracked week over week; invisible in any one headline.
Sources: permit dashboard, staffing reports
Task 11Biweekly
Cross Connections
“How do these events connect?”
National → State → LocalThis week
The bus-route cuts, the state transit-grant formula change, and last year’s federal infrastructure bill are one story: the federal formula shifted, the state reallocated, your route lost its subsidy.
Connects: federal bill § 4, state grant notice, transit-board minutes
3 sources · 1 storyThis week
The school-zone road redesign appears in three places that never cite each other: the county safety audit, the city capital budget, and a planning-commission agenda.
Connects: audit p. 12, budget line 3.7, agenda item 5
Your topicWeekly
A topic you choose
“What’s happening with what I care about?”
Interest · EducationThis week
You follow education, so every briefing is weighted to it: the school-board vote, the state funding-formula change your district gains from, and the national curriculum rule — gathered across all three levels without you asking twice.
From your interests in project memory
Interest · EconomyOngoing
Swap the topic anytime — tell it “follow the economy” and local business permits, development incentives, subsidy opportunities, and employment figures start appearing, with history kept from that week on.
One line in your permanent instructions

Illustrative content — your briefings are built from your city’s official agendas, minutes, budgets, and gazettes.

Two ways to run it

Plain text · tooling-agnostic
Hosted A cloud project A Project in ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini with memory and scheduled tasks. Fastest start, strongest reasoning, built-in web search. ·Set up in minutes ·Best briefing quality, least maintenance ·Your data lives with the provider Hosted guide → Self-hosted A local model Ollama or LM Studio on your own machine, driven by a scheduler. Private, sovereign, works offline — it can’t be switched off or geofenced. ·Your data never leaves your machine ·Free after hardware; runs on a laptop ·You supply search: an API, RSS, or paste Self-hosted guide →

Results depend on the model and on online information available for your location.

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