For all the data and more analysis: legislata.com/blog/unlocking…

Movies suggest that lobbyists get their power from their campaign donations. For #mapoli that's almost certainly not true. For the top recipients of donations from lobbyists, they represent a small fraction of overall receipts. - Spilka: 7% - Michlewitz: 5% - Healey: 1.4%

The big takeaway? Lobbying can be lucrative, with about 75 lobbyists earning more than any state elected official. It raises the question of why we as the public don't pay our elected officials and their staff more. It's important work and they have other career options.

It includes: -donations by lobbyist - donations received by candidate - each individual lobbying activity, including what bills were lobbied on and to what elected officials, - client spending -the top 50 lobbyists by earnings in 2023 and the first half of 2024.

As mentioned in today's @politicoma playbook from @kellygarrity3, we've compiled lobbying data for #mapoli here: legislata.com/blog/unlocking…

Looking to talk to freelance and local journalists in #mapoli about what you’d want in a Substack-like platform for the policy world. DMs open and please share this for reach!

Our AI-generated transcripts of #mapoli council/select board meetings is ready to go! We've got a launch price of $19/month and, we're going to offer one free month to anyone who tags someone in the comments to this post and a free month to the person tagged.

We're off to a New Year in #bospoli. Here's the transcript of the first meeting, brought to you by the Boston Policy Institute: app.legislata.com/public_off…

This allows us to provide transcripts for meetings that would otherwise not have any available and require citizens to watch hours of video to find out what happened. Of course, if there are meetings that you'd like this service for, send a DM!

There is a lot of debate about the role of AI in government, but here is an example of its value. While we know that the transcription is not perfect (AI was not trained on the Boston accent), it can be done far cheaper and faster than human transcription

Here's the Council meeting from last week. Words are color-coded to show AI confidence in the transcription, and you can click on any word to jump to that moment in the meeting to confirm for yourself.

Thanks to @stephmsolis and @axios for featuring our work for the Boston Policy Institute to create AI-generated transcripts of City Council meetings. They're free to view for anyone interested axios.com/local/boston/2023/…

For our last #mapoli post of the year, we've invented a new political statistic - average donor share. Check out how all the political candidates over the last three years compare in the percentage of their donors' contributions that go to them. legislata.com/blog/average-d…

To answer one question some people may have, we didn't make any subjective decisions. The communities were detected by an algorithm working over the OCPF data and the lists of candidates in each community is sorted by their "centrality", another algorithmic output.

We stumbled onto some new #mapoli insights with our latest deep dive. Using @OCPFReports data, we mapped which candidates shared donors and used that to construct a network map and see what donors think are the real parties across the Commonwealth. legislata.com/blog/the-real-…