Chicago Councilmatic Notes

Keep track of recent changes we have made to Chicago Councilmatic.

Oct 10, 2024 - Automated Legislation Summaries

Chicago Councilmatic is now showing auto-generated summaries for most non-routine legislation! To do this, we used a Large Language Model (ChatGPT) to take the ordinance text and asked it to provide a short, detailed, and accurate summary. Here’s how we did it.

Jun 07, 2024 - Alder Campaign Donations

Chicago Councilmatic is now showing campaign donations for each Alder on their detail page. Political campaign contributions are required to be disclosed to the Illinois State Board of Elections, which has data going back to 1994. You can now search for donations, updated daily, by donor name, address, date, amount and type, along with a link to the official filing.

Oct 02, 2023 - Videos and detailed agendas for meetings

Over the past few weeks, we have added some major improvements to the detail pages for Chicago City Council and Committee meetings. When available, we embed meeting videos and show detailed agendas with links to ordinances and sponsors.

Aug 04, 2023 - New legislation identifiers

As part of the Chicago City Clerk’s update to a new Legislative Management System, any legislation that was currently active in June 2023 was given a new identifier. These identifiers are different than the ones they were given in the Legistar system.

Jul 28, 2023 - Using data from chicityclerkelms.chicago.gov

We are now using data from chicityclerkelms.chicago.gov to power Chicago Councilmatic. We have, however, noticed several issues with how the data in the new system is structured. We have informed the Chicago City Clerk about these issues.

Jun 16, 2023 - Chicago City Clerk launches new system

The Chicago City Clerk has launched a new Legislative Management System to replace Legistar. It can be reached at chicityclerkelms.chicago.gov.