Why subscribe?
Local governments have to make most of their discussions and materials public. They don’t have to make them easy to find, review, or understand.
The goal of Track the Triangle is to take that publicly available information from Historic Triangle government bodies and make it palatable and useful, in a way that helps people participate in the democratic process.
Currently, this newsletter sends out a monthly recap of Williamsburg-James City County school division meetings. These recaps are produced through a combination of python scripts and an AI model using a scoring rubric to identify discussion highlights, which are all reviewed by the author JW Caterine.
The goal is to expand our offerings to include monthly recaps of York County school board meetings and further down the road monthly recaps of Williamsburg City Council, James City County Board of Supervisors, and York County Board of Supervisors.
In addition to the recaps, we will occasionally produce other reports or tools that serve government accountability or transparency, such as this explorer page for the WJCC school division’s redistricting survey results. If you have a tip or idea for a FOIA request or tool, please contact me.
What happened to Round the Triangle?
Round the Triangle (as in “heard ‘round the Triangle”) was the first iteration of this project that produced a roundup of local news stories, in addition to a podcast, news quizzes, and other offerings. In April 2024, the publication started doing its first AI-assisted school board summaries and began to focus more on that until the publication paused in September of that year.
Since that pause, the domain name for roundthetriangle.com expired and now redirects to some gambling website. That motivated the name change, but honestly it was a long time coming since the newsletter’s products have shifted significantly from the publication’s beginnings.
How you can support
Paid subscriptions are currently paused, although I do plan on bringing them back at some point to fund the development of this project.
For now, you can support the project by sharing with friends and family! And also sending feedback - would love to know how I could make the publication more useful.
-JW
