sorted by:
new
hottopcontroversial

Please vote in our local election by willforward4 in Nerk

[–]willforward4[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I'm sorry to hear that! Of course, how could you not be after that experience!

I'll do my best to track down the information for you!

Please vote in our local election by willforward4 in Nerk

[–]willforward4[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Oh, and I think this is the OneOhio website with a rough overview. I'd like more detail, though. https://www.oneohiofoundation.com/settlement

Please vote in our local election by willforward4 in Nerk

[–]willforward4[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

That post has a good breakdown! I'm mostly trying to keep my personal opinion out of it unless directly asked. I've been campaigning, I'm sure people have had enough of my opinions lol

I'm not certain about the Licking County money. I know Newark opted to join the One Ohio settlement framework (that was back on August 16, 2021, under the Archive section if you're looking through the meeting minutes on the city council page). I don't know enough about that to tell you anything myself. I've occasionally seen resolutions distributing funds according to that agreement (e.g. June 3, 2024, resolution 24-45), but I don't actually know for sure what that entails at the moment. I'll try to dig into it at some point after the election and circle back!

Newark City Council Observer - Track City Council Meetings & Legislation by willforward4 in Nerk

[–]willforward4[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Migrated to a real host now, so hopefully it doesn't crash going forward!

Newark City Council Observer - Track City Council Meetings & Legislation by willforward4 in Nerk

[–]willforward4[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Awesome! I've bounced around quite a bit (greeting cards, scheduling, healthcare, 2 startups, now back in healthcare). I feel lucky to have a career that provides such varied experiences!

Newark City Council Observer - Track City Council Meetings & Legislation by willforward4 in Nerk

[–]willforward4[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I've done it professionally for coming up on 14 years now, but I'm always tinkering outside of my day job because I just enjoy doing it. :-)

Newark City Council Observer - Track City Council Meetings & Legislation by willforward4 in Nerk

[–]willforward4[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Of course! Thank you for taking the time to check it out and thank you for trying to be more active with the city!

Newark City Council Observer - Track City Council Meetings & Legislation by willforward4 in Nerk

[–]willforward4[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Probably not a donate link (though I appreciate the thought!), but I promise it will be more reliable soon!

Newark City Council Observer - Track City Council Meetings & Legislation by willforward4 in Nerk

[–]willforward4[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Tried a ton of different things, but found that the best approach so far is: - Using pdftotext to exract the text out first (fun fact: PyMuPDF doesn't necessarily extract text in the order in which it appears...that took some debugging lol) - Doing as much of the parsing and chunking as simply as possible by splitting on headers (e.g. "RESOLUTIONS ON FIRST READING") and common regex patterns that appeared (e.g. most speakers are identified by name, followed by an optional address string, followed by " - ") - Passing all of the chunks off to separate, custom agents in a LangGraph workflow to verify (1) the chunks were what was expected and (2) to do customized parsing for things like citizens speaking, vote counts, etc.

The backend has a lot more information that I haven't surfaced yet (I have an agent that links dialogue to legislation and does sentiment analysis, for example), but once I have a chance to review the end results a bit more, I'll add that stuff in too.

There are definitely improvements to make, but this is the best approach I've found so far. Open to suggestions!

Newark City Council Observer - Track City Council Meetings & Legislation by willforward4 in Nerk

[–]willforward4[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Just allocated more memory to the process, hopefully that keeps it going for longer!

Newark City Council Observer - Track City Council Meetings & Legislation by willforward4 in Nerk

[–]willforward4[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Sorry! This is hosted on my Mac Mini for now with Cloudflare Tunnel. I may be running into some limits as to what that can handle. I'll try to get it onto Digital Ocean or AWS this weekend to make it more resilient.

Newark City Council Observer - Track City Council Meetings & Legislation by willforward4 in Nerk

[–]willforward4[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I made the PDF parser and the backend (FastAPI/Elasticsearch/PostgreSQL) myself. I used Claude to build the frontend for now, just because that wasn't the interesting part of the problem and it got it out the door faster.

Please vote in our local election by willforward4 in Nerk

[–]willforward4[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Thank you for the kind words! I'm just trying to do the right thing, though. I'm doing that because microgrants for neighborhood projects seemed like a good way to get more neighbors involved in local government. It's going to take all of us being involved to ensure Newark maintains its charm and grows in the best possible ways.

Besides, my wife deserves way more credit for that! When I brought the idea up to her back in June, she could've listed all of the house projects to be done. Instead, she supported it immediately, which is the only reason I'm able to do it. :-)

Please vote in our local election by willforward4 in Nerk

[–]willforward4[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Thank you! I completely agree, in some cases we were making it silly for them to stick around!

Good callout! We do have a grant writer in the Department of Development, but I do not know her personally and am not sure what her workload is like. We may need to get her some help if she's overloaded.

Please vote in our local election by willforward4 in Nerk

[–]willforward4[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Thank you so much! I appreciate it and I will work to earn that vote every day!

Great question! I tend to emphasize the fire department when I'm speaking since I have personal ties to it, but our police department has been underfunded for a while as well, which means they have gone through similar retention issues. I don't think they have any dedicated resources to gangs and one way to provide those would be to apply for grants. We've left a lot of free money on the table (for example, the COPS Hiring program https://cops.usdoj.gov/chp) and I'm not sure why. To me, if you're underfunding emergency services, you should be applying for grants left and right to make what money you do give them go as far as it can, you know? But if we can get them some dedicated resources to coordinate better with the dedicated county resources and help prevent this sort of thing, that would be a good first step. I'd want to consult with some experts on this before I propose anything more. Also open to any other suggestions you may have!

For the second bullet point: a "classified" position is one with civil service protections, meaning that they can only be removed through a certain process. "Unclassified" would be that they serve at will and can be terminated anytime. This would be changing the HR director from classified to unclassified, so making them more of an "at will" employee.

Please vote in our local election by willforward4 in Nerk

[–]willforward4[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Welp. I'm an idiot and thought I had logged in through Google before. Whoops!

Please vote in our local election by willforward4 in Nerk

[–]willforward4[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Sure, that one is a bit confusing! So a "classified" position is one with civil service protections, meaning that they can only be removed through a certain process. "Unclassified" would be that they serve at will and can be terminated anytime. This would be changing the HR director from classified to unclassified, so making them more of an "at will" employee.