Revolutionizing Board Meeting Minutes with AI and Minute Maker
Overview
The Cal Poly Digital Transformation Hub (DxHub), powered by Amazon Web Services (AWS) and part of the AWS Cloud Innovation Centers program, partnered with Lynwood Unified School District to develop Minute Maker. This AI-powered application transforms how public sector organizations generate and distribute meeting minutes.
Minute Maker addresses a critical challenge for school districts, city councils, county boards, regional planning commissions, and other public sector entities across the United States. These organizations currently invest significant resources and employee hours manually transcribing and summarizing discussions, causing delays in public access to important decisions.
By using generative AI, Minute Maker automatically processes meeting recordings and agenda documents, producing comprehensive, accurately cited minutes in a fraction of the time and cost of traditional methods. Beyond saving employee time and operational costs, this solution advances public governance by enhancing transparency and community engagement across all levels of government and public administration.
Problem
At Lynwood Unified School District, staff spent up to 3 days—24 working hours—manually preparing meeting minutes for a single board session. Thousands of school districts, city councils, county supervisors, and other public agencies nationwide replicate this pattern.
This labor-intensive process creates several critical challenges:
- Extended turnaround times prevent timely public access to meeting outcomes
- High labor costs divert resources from core organizational missions
- Inconsistent formatting and detail levels affect documentation quality
- Difficulty referencing specific discussion points hampers accountability
For organizations committed to open governance, these delays directly contradict their values and obligations to communities. The need for an automated, accurate, and cost-effective solution became urgent as public demands for transparency continued to grow.
Innovation In Action
Minute Maker transforms meeting documentation through sophisticated natural language processing. The solution transcribes and analyzes meeting recordings, matching discussion points with agenda items and generating comprehensive minutes automatically. Using AI-powered speaker identification, Minute Maker identifies speakers and accurately captures votes and key decisions.
Organizations customize the generated minutes to match their existing document formats, ensuring consistency with established standards. A standout feature is the interactive citation system—each point includes a clickable citation that takes readers directly to the corresponding part of the meeting recording, enhancing transparency and verification.
The solution supports:
- Meetings up to 12 hours long
- Agenda Portable Document Format (PDF) files up to 100 pages
- Multiple languages including English and Spanish
Early implementation results demonstrate:
- Time reduction from 3 days to less than 1 hour for generating minutes
- Cost decrease from 24 working hours to under $2 per hour of video
- Release of meeting minutes within hours of board meetings
- Accurate capture of votes, decisions, and discussion points with verifiable citations
Technical Solution
Minute Maker uses a serverless architecture leveraging multiple AWS services for security, scalability, and reliability. Amazon Bedrock powers the secure processing of meeting transcripts and agenda documents, providing advanced natural language understanding capabilities.
AWS Lambda, Amazon Application Programming Interface (API) Gateway, and AWS Step Functions orchestrate the complex process of transcription, analysis, and minute generation. Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) securely stores meeting recordings, agenda PDFs, and generated minutes, ensuring data protection and easy retrieval.
Developers built Minute Maker using Next.js, TypeScript, and Python, integrating seamlessly with existing Information Technology (IT) infrastructures. The solution is available as a one-click deploy Cloud Development Kit (CDK) package, allowing any public sector organization to implement it with minimal technical overhead.
For enhanced security requirements, Amazon Cognito handles authentication, which integrates with existing single sign-on systems as needed. This flexibility ensures Minute Maker meets diverse security and compliance requirements across different public sector entities.
Next Steps
As public sector organizations increasingly prioritize efficiency and transparency, the need for tools like Minute Maker continues to grow. The DxHub and Lynwood Unified School District partnership demonstrates how organizations can deploy generative AI to solve complex administrative challenges while maintaining high public governance standards.
The DxHub plans to expand capabilities based on feedback, with potential enhancements including:
- Support for additional languages to serve diverse communities
- Integration with popular meeting platforms and streaming services
- Advanced analytics on meeting content and trends
- Automated action item tracking and follow-up systems
Organizations interested in implementing Minute Maker can begin with a pilot deployment to assess impact before full-scale implementation. The DxHub team continues to refine the solution and welcomes collaboration with additional public sector partners facing similar documentation challenges.
Supporting Documents
| Source Code | All of the code and assets developed during the course of creating the prototype. |
| System Architecture | A diagram that describes the technical components needed to implement the solution. |
About the DxHub
The Cal Poly Digital Transformation Hub (DxHub) is a strategic relationship with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and is the world’s first cloud innovation center supported by AWS on a University campus. The primary goal of the DxHub is to provide students with real-world problem-solving experiences by immersing them in the application of proven innovation methods in combination with the latest technologies to solve important challenges in the public sector. The challenges being addressed cover a wide variety of topics including homelessness, evidence-based policing, digital literacy, virtual cybersecurity laboratories and many others. The DxHub leverages the deep subject matter expertise of government, education, and non-profit organizations to clearly understand the customers affected by public sector challenges and develop solutions that meet the customer needs.