Hamlet

Transforming local information into insights. Know what's happening in city hall before it affects your project.

[Hamlet @hamlet4gov]

Oh, hey -- that's us! 👋

You can track what cities are saying about pickleball (and data centers, and surveillance cameras, and more) on our Rankings page, launched just last week:
https://t.co/LFYNTq9lMJ

[Turner Novak 🍌🧢 @TurnerNovak]

Someone made a site that tracks what people are talking about at public city council meetings across the US.

The only thing discussed more than data centers?

Pickleball courts.

[Hamlet @hamlet4gov]

Reporting on local government? Researching local policy?

Hamlet offers free API access to verified journalists and academic researchers.

Search public meeting transcripts, track policy discussions, and verify quotes against source video.

Apply: https://t.co/ysdAHngj7z

[The Driverless Digest @driverlessguy_]

Featured in The Driverless Digest 👉 https://t.co/92FYXBkGV8

[The Driverless Digest @driverlessguy_]

Waymo, robotaxis, or driverless cars were mentioned in:
• 7.6% of San Francisco meetings
• 3.8% of Los Angeles meetings (19 of 497)

Cool tool by @subes01. you can can check it out here 👉https://t.co/8OyrvpDu2m

🧵 (2/3)

[The Driverless Digest @driverlessguy_]

How much are city halls actually talking about robotaxis? 🤖🏛️

@hamlet4gov transcribed 2,257 public meetings across SF, NY, Chicago, Oakland, and LA from Oct 2025 to Oct 2026.

🧵 (1/3)

[Sunil Rajaraman @subes01]

I repurposed our data pipeline at Hamlet, which is normally used to analyze public meetings, into a way to analyze all of Jensen Huang's long form interviews since 2021 (that I could find).

Really interesting stuff - there are definite trends over time across a wide variety of subjects ranging from AI Safety to how much he talks about the United States, and competition.

Enjoy!

[Hamlet @hamlet4gov]

Pickleball courts vs. data centers. 🏓🏭

Same council chambers. Very different reactions.

59% of public speakers backed pickleball. In a sample, 97% opposed data centers.

Here's what Hamlet found: https://t.co/fqIKyFmi9b

[Sunil Rajaraman @subes01]

Holy S***! We looked at tens of thousands of public meetings to figure out which cities swear the most per 100 hours. It's LA by a longshot and it's not even close. If you're looking for polite deliberation I recommend Bellevue, WA!

The swear jar chart doesn't go that low, but let's just say that there's a lot of.... colorful language used in school board.

[Hamlet @hamlet4gov]

You follow politics. But are you missing the plot?

Hamlet CEO Sunil Rajaraman (@subes01) on @MTSlive : the data center fights are just one example. Every important fight about cities is happening in a council chamber.

Thanks to MTS Live and host @sophiadew for having us.

💻 https://t.co/WZqJhxINbn

[Semafor @semafor]

Startup Hamlet has parsed tens of thousands of city council meetings by scraping local governments’ video recordings, tagging comments as friendly or hostile to a potential project.

CEO Sunil Rajaraman told Semafor that a large fund that finances data centers and a data-center developer are among its paying customers.

Read more from @jdcapelouto: https://t.co/fjdwqwjYi6

[Connor Grant @connorgrant]

When I bought a house a few years ago, I wanted to get more familiar with the decisions my local government made

The problem was that town halls happened during working hours (nuts!) and finding transcripts was like finding a needle in a haystack

@subes01's Hamlet fixes that!

[Browserbase @browserbase]

Read the full case study:
https://t.co/cbrtW9ChUq

[Browserbase @browserbase]

Hamlet's team used to download every agenda PDF and meeting video by hand.

Now they automate it with browser agents and cut costs by 70%. Learn how they scaled it on Browserbase below.

[Sunil Rajaraman @subes01]

You can peruse the data at https://t.co/bMvDChzZMH or https://t.co/0Gz8yrBm3W

[Sunil Rajaraman @subes01]

Please vote for your City Council and School Board today! We decided to eliminate an excuse for you to make it happen by using Hamlet data....

First off, I think this is widely known but no elected official matters to your day-to-day life as much as a great City Councilmember, or School Board Member. City Managers play a crucial role too, but it's the job of a Council Member to effectively be a board member and hire great City Managers.

Council members also appoint your Planning Commissioners and other public commissions. You want to know who these people are and what they stand for. Voter turnout for these down ballot roles is abysmal - change that starting today please!

We decided to make our San Francisco, Oakland, New York, Los Angeles and Chicago data available for free to peruse. This will give you a sense of what your City Council or equivalent body is talking about, and how they deliberate. We also made some of our school board data available on site for you to browse.

Fun Facts:

San Francisco's supervisors spent more time on ceremonies than on any policy topic. Almost 28 hours of commendations, more than a fifth of their full-board meeting time.

Data centers came to city hall this summer. They came up in 7.9% of big-city meetings from July to September, up from under 2% last fall.

Robotaxis are a San Francisco story. Waymo, robotaxis or driverless cars came up in 7.6% of San Francisco's public meetings over the past year (58 of 762), against 1.9% in the other four cities. In July, the fire chief told the Fire Commission a Waymo "apparently drove over fireworks and caught fire."

ICE is all over city hall. It came up in 88 of Chicago's 290 meetings and 144 of LA's 497. In New York, six immigration hearings drew an average of almost 30 public speakers, against an average of 8 across all New York meetings.

Phones and AI at the school board. Phones came up in 222 districts and AI in 249, in at least 7.5% and 8% of the board meetings we transcribed.

ENJOY and please vote!

[Antoine Levy @LevyAntoine]

Very cool. By the way, this is done by Sunil Rajaraman at Hamlet (@myhamletinc), who gave an awesome presentation on tech advances in local governments in my MBA class last year!

[NewsTongue @NewsTongueX]

🔴 AI startup Hamlet targets $2 trillion in annual local government spending

Approximately $2 trillion of economic activity flows through local government annually, much of it decided in public meetings with sparse attendance. Hamlet, a new AI company founded by Sunil Rajaraman, uses machine learning to summarize public information and make local government proceedings more accessible to residents.

[Hamlet @hamlet4gov]

Know who you’re voting for? Check the record. 🗳

Search 3,100+ local officials by name or city and hear what they said in public meetings, down to the second.

Takes 2 minutes. Do it before Nov. 3: https://t.co/UJfGbPr8kk

[Hamlet @hamlet4gov]

You vote for president. Do you vote for city council?

Hamlet CEO Sunil Rajaraman (@subes01) on @MTSlive: local races shape your daily life, and turnout is often 10–25%. Know who’s on your ballot, all the way down.

💻 https://t.co/cyY3Qm8rM3