Code with Asheville: Civic Transparency Workshop with Sunshine Meetings

Update 03/19: We have secured a venue for this event, at 105 Fairview Road. We will also provide a video link for anyone who would like to participate remotely.

Huge thank you to Shane @ Aktiga for offering a space for the event, and to Jay Hill for coordinating the venue search!

What’s actually happening in your local government — and how would you even find out?

Join us for a hands-on workshop exploring how people in Western North Carolina follow (or try to follow) local government. Whether you’re a journalist covering city hall, a researcher studying civic engagement, a neighborhood advocate, or just someone who wants to know what the school board decided last Tuesday — this event is for you.

What we’ll do:

Part 1: Group Discussion We’ll kick things off with a facilitated conversation about your relationship with local government. What topics matter to you? How do you currently stay informed? What works, what doesn’t, and what’s missing? No expertise required — just curiosity.

Part 2: Sunshine Meetings Demo We’ll walk through Sunshine Meetings, a free civic transparency platform that indexes meetings from 80+ government bodies across WNC — with AI-powered transcripts, search, and summaries. You’ll see how it works, and we’ll share a bit about our privacy-first approach to AI workloads.

Part 3: Help Us Make It Better We’ve built a new usability testing system and we’d love your input. You’ll have the chance to try guided tasks on the platform and share feedback that directly shapes what we build next.
Whether you stay for the whole event or just drop in for the discussion, your perspective matters. Sunshine Meetings is built for the community, and we want it to reflect what the community actually needs.