Wish for it, and it will come.

For years, A Little Beacon Blog republished the City of Beacon’s Agendas for City Council Meetings, Planning Board Meetings, and Zoning Board Meetings in a section called “Local Government Easy Access.” These pages were fully linked to Resolutions, Public Hearings, Hirings, Proclamations, and everything else to be discussed at that meeting, with the video embedded to keep everything in one place. With an easier, more gracious Search box.

Over the course of those years, ALBB has had two different employees who did this arduous work (the City’s agendas are very wonky and hard to copy/paste from), but when ALBB had to scale back to just one employee, this very important task was abandoned.

Recently, a reader sent us a link to News In Town, a website that provided recaps of City meetings. The reader asked ALBB if News In Town was AI. The News In Town website produced recaps of all of these meetings and linked externally to the Agendas. The Recaps, however, weren’t bad. In that, they were accurate when measured against full meetings ALBB had watched and reported on.

While it definitely seemed AI, ALBB dug around and found the man behind the robot. Robot Heart is the AI behind the regeneration of these agendas - and the design - built by Jeremy Belcher, who lives part time in Beacon. Jeremy is a self-described designer of custom software and apps for businesses without a technology team.

Katie of ALBB reached out to Jeremy to make sure he was a real person - and indeed he is! “I love A Little Beacon Blog,” he said in response. “I have been subscriber for years.” Jeremy said that he started News In Town because he wanted to see what was being built around town. “You know those renderings you see posted on the scaffolding of construction site projects in NYC?” he asked Katie, who also used to live in NYC. “Yes!” she answered. “Well I don’t see those posted on projects in Beacon,” Jeremy answered. “Exactly,” agreed Katie. Why.

Is it because they change, sometimes, with seemingly no oversight, or selective oversight? Who knows.

While Katie is not a fan of AI, she knows it has advantages when used responsibly - and not to kill people, like Planatir and Israel like to do.

Jeremy and Katie partnered to create an AI robot to collect the linked agendas from the City of Beacon’s website, and rewrite them in code for A Little Beacon Blog to publish here on our website, verbatim. This gives us easier search and link ability.

This use of AI has not cost anyone their job here at ALBB. Both Katie and her employees really dreaded doing it. Not doing it by hand allows Katie to continue researching, reporting, writing, creating advertiser campaigns, and packaging that all up to deliver to you in socials, newsletter and articles. One day we’ll be able to hire someone again. That’s the next wish.

If Katie has watched any of the City government meetings in full, and has cross-checked them against News In Town’s AI generated Recap, she will link up ALBB’s Agenda page to those succinct Recaps. Katie will continue recording her Gold Nugget Recap videos for our audio/video listeners, and produce originally written articles from the Agenda. You know how ALBB likes a Deep Dive.

Hiring Katie and/or Jeremy For Your Digital Project

Katie has been a website designer and producer for over 20 years. It’s the behind the scenes work that most readers of ALBB don’t know that she did or does. You can learn more about her collaborative projects at Katie James, Inc. In those years, Katie has worked with a select number of highly skilled developers to build clients what they want, writing custom code and working with drag-n-drop platform solutions.

Katie is very picky about who she works with. Jeremy is the third developer she has partnered with, and looks forward to seeing what new projects come out of their collaboration.

Reach out to Katie if you need a website, app, or print project designed for you.