In a major leap forward for public understanding of democracy in Massachusetts, transcripts of all state legislative hearings are now accessible for the first time, for free, thanks to a newly-released feature of MAPLE, the Massachusetts Platform for Legislative Engagement. While the Massachusetts legislature’s website offers closed captioning on hearing videos, MAPLE is using generative AI to automatically add time-stamped transcripts to its hearing pages, allowing the transcripts to be read, downloaded and searched.
“MAPLE is now the only platform in Massachusetts where you can search, browse, and analyze every State House hearing, with timestamped transcripts linked to bill information, public testimony, and committee votes,” said Matthew Victor, Co-Founder of MAPLE. “And, like the rest of our platform, we provide this for free – as a public good to make it easy for people to meaningfully fulfill our civic responsibilities.”
The hearing transcripts join MAPLE’s existing tools, which allow users to:
- Access the full text and AI-generated summaries for every bill introduced in the past five years;
- Add testimony to MAPLE’s bill pages, either as an individual or an organization, with an option to email testimony to committee chairs and your own legislators
- Track bills and other users, and receive updates as a bill moves through the legislature or when a user adds new testimony;
- Filter and sort the thousands of introduced bills using AI-generated keywords and advanced sorting criteria.
“Making hearings accessible helps people see the real constraints and tradeoffs legislators grapple with,” said State Sen. Dylan Fernandes. “MAPLE supports more informed and constructive civic participation.”
MAPLE is a nonprofit project of Partners In Democracy that helps people contribute to state-level policymaking by better connecting constituents to one another and to legislators. It was originally launched in 2023 with support from Northeastern University School of Law’s NuLawLab, Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center, Boston University’s SPARK program, and volunteer developers from Code for Boston. MAPLE aims to:
- Increase access to legislative information and opportunities to contribute to the legislative process
- Engage a wider set of stakeholders and perspectives in policy-making
- Strengthen the relationships between constituents and legislators
- Encourage common understanding and illuminate consensus
“At a time when the internet is increasingly paywalled and siloed, this is a throwback – volunteer coders creating a new public good that’s incredibly valuable and available to everyone for free,” said Jerren Chang, President and CEO of Partners In Democracy. “This is only one step into a much wider world of what AI tools could do to improve our democracy.”
View hearing transcripts at mapletestimony.org/hearings.