About the Ledger

In one paragraph

We record public meetings of Vigo County and Terre Haute governing bodies, transcribe them, and write up the handful of moments each week that actually affect residents. Every sentence we publish links to the exact moment in the meeting video, or to the source document it came from. This is AI-assisted work reviewed by a person before it is published.

Where the material comes from

Meetings are streamed and archived by the City of Terre Haute on its public YouTube channel; agendas, roll calls, ordinances and resolutions are published as PDFs on terrehaute.in.gov. We read both. We do not attend meetings, and we do not have sources inside government — everything here is drawn from records the public bodies themselves publish.

What is automated

• Finding new meetings, and fetching the video and agenda.
• Transcribing the audio, and separating who is speaking from whom.
• Drafting the meeting record, the highlights, and the entity timelines.
• Checking that every published sentence has a working source link.

What a person does

Every generated note is reviewed and accepted by a person before it appears here. Nothing an agent writes is published automatically. A reviewer checks that the claim matches the source, that the timestamp lands in the right place, and that anyone named is named correctly.

What we deliberately do not do

• We do not endorse candidates, score officials, or make recommendations.
• We do not host comments — it changes the moderation burden and the trust

profile entirely.

• We are not a local news site. We cover meetings, not the town.
• We do not use engagement mechanics: no infinite scroll, no streaks, no

notification pressure.

Where it is weakest

Being straight about the limits:

• Names. Automatic transcription mangles surnames. We correct them against

the official roster, but an unusual name can still slip through. Anything attributed to a named person at lower confidence is marked.

• Speakers. We can usually tell voices apart, and often work out who is who

from the roll call and from the chair addressing people by name. When we cannot, we say "a resident" or "a councillor" rather than guess.

• Coverage. See coverage for which bodies we cover and how far back.

If something here is wrong, tell us — corrections are published, not quietly patched.

If something here is wrong, we want to know, and we will say so publicly.

How to report

Send the page and what is wrong with it. If you can point at the moment in the video or the passage in the document, that helps, but it is not required — "the vote count is wrong" is a perfectly good report.

What happens

1. We check the claim against the source recording or document. 2. If it is wrong, we fix the page and publish a correction note recording what was wrong and when it was fixed. 3. The corrected page links to the correction. We do not quietly edit and move on.

Target turnaround is under 24 hours from report to visible fix.

Corrections are a published record

Every correction is its own note in Corrections/, with the original error stated plainly. That is deliberate: an archive that silently rewrites itself is not an archive. The count of corrections we issue is a number we track and do not hide.

Claims about people

We hold anything said about a named individual to a higher bar than anything else. A vote, an accusation, or a characterization of someone is only attributed to a named person when we are confident it was them; otherwise it is attributed by role. If we get a person's name wrong, that is the correction we treat as most urgent.

Bodies

| Body | Status | | --- | --- | | Terre Haute City Council | Covered | | Vigo County Council | Covered | | Vigo County Commissioners | Not yet | | Terre Haute Board of Public Works | Not yet | | Area Plan Commission | Not yet | | Terre Haute Redevelopment Commission | Not yet |

How far back

Backfill depth is stated here and kept current. It is a trust signal: an archive that will not tell you where it starts is asking you to assume coverage it may not have.

(To be filled in on first full run — see `backfill_months` in frontmatter.)

Known gaps

• Meetings with no published video and no machine-readable agenda cannot be

anchored, and are not published rather than summarized without sources.

• Scanned (image-only) agendas cannot be read automatically. Recall for those

meetings is not measurable, and they are flagged.

• Where a meeting was covered from the agenda alone, without a transcript, the

meeting note records that — expect fewer highlights from those.