If someone walks into an OUSD board meeting for the first time, they might walk over to the table where printed copies of the evening's agenda are stacked. If they are curious enough to pick one up, you could not blame them for wondering if it was going to be a particularly busy night; there's a good chance that what they picked up has over 100 sheets in it!

But it's not a busy night, it's just another regular board meeting, where typically about two-thirds of that printed agenda is taken up by "General Consent Report" items. These items, which are up for a vote on that evening, authorize OUSD expenditures often totaling tens of millions of dollars,¹ and the services and staff that are paid from these dollars touch every imaginable part of the school district's day-to-day operations.

Many of the meetings I've attended feature at least a few disgruntled comments by either the public or the board itself about the sheer quantity of consent items on a given night. It's understandable, considering we're asking the public to read, understand, and comment on, and board members to read, understand, and vote on, everything in that report, with sometimes no more than 72 hours notice.² Pretty much everyone finds this to be unreasonable and yet another barrier to transparency in a district that isn't exactly batting 1.000 in that category.

It's here that I want to point out these quick things to those of you who find all of this infuriating and outrageous:

• The number of contracts and agreements that are legally required to be approved by the board in a public vote, after a public review period, is incredibly high because many of the district's day-to-day operations depend on these agreements.³
• Many of the contracts are voted on after work has already started, because of various bottlenecks in the process of getting them in front of the board and the fact that lots of stuff in there (essential services, repairs, etc.) cannot wait that long.⁴
• There simply isn't enough time to devote public comment, board comment, and votes to every single item they are legally required to review, so they have to lump it all in under one vote.
• The public has to take it on faith that our elected board members read every item before the meeting, because they are allowed to pull anything out for an up-or-down vote if it's something they have questions or concerns about.⁵

It really all feels like a system set up for a district that doesn't depend on as many contracts as OUSD does, but since I'm not really sure where to start with that, this post is instead about a project I'm releasing today to try and do the best we can with what we have now.

Ancient Problems Meet Modern Tools

I've named this project the Consent Report Tracker. It is the result of my own personal frustration with trying to read and even sort of understand what's in a typical consent report given five days or so to try to process it. I won't blame this on anything but boring old bureaucracy and compliance: Everything including the final contract for each item is made public with the legally required notice period, and nothing seems to be hidden from view intentionally. What is available to us is both comprehensive and barely organized, so while I do believe OUSD is trying to be transparent, the result is actually translucence, like a very old window.

My main profession since the early part of the century has been web development, and I'm eager to use that experience to try and support positive change here in Oakland however I can. Additionally, because we live in a time where Artificial Intelligence is both ubiquitous and terrifying in its potential to do harm, I am interested in finding ways to shape AI's capabilities to do good. I believe we have to do this as a society, because why should it exist otherwise?

What I've built to try and help that process along is relatively simple in concept: Take all the public data and organize it in a readable fashion. Make every piece of official text available. Then use AI to summarize the parts that are confusing and time-consuming to read, written at an 8th-grade level.⁶ Be clear and transparent about when AI is being used, and remind everyone to approach that part with a healthy, constructive skepticism.

You will notice that I've captured consent reports going back to 2019 at this point, and there is a ton of historical data around spending and vendors already baked in.⁷ It has already raised some specific concerns that I talk about in a note under separate cover, and I will be continually looking for items of interest and concern both historically and as new meetings are posted. I hope you will join me!

As a part of this project, I've published all the data and AI logic behind it in a public repository that anyone can use to download and reproduce what I've done, or look at the data for other information.⁸ The caveat is, as it always is: I'm just a dad at OUSD (and a decent engineer) and I'm trying my best, but there's almost no way that this platform is without some serious flaws out of the gate. Feedback is always welcome, especially if you're cool about it.

I expect the next school board meeting agenda to be posted sometime tomorrow (Friday),⁹ and I've set up a mailing list to automatically notify folks who subscribe right when it's official and has been captured by the consent tracker. If you are interested, please sign up!

Lastly, I'd like to shout out to the amazing team at Aleph, the tiny company that I founded years ago around wanting to build stuff like this. My staff is the best in the business, and the only reason we can donate the time, money and energy to give a project like this to the community is because of them. #muchlove