Tanveer Patel Doesn’t Just Say She Wants Transparency—She Has A Plan To Bring It to Hoover

Transparency.

Every candidate says they’re all in favor of it—and then they get elected.

Have you ever tried to find out what’s going on in your city? I have. It’s about as much fun as pulling your own teeth with a pair of pliers.

Oh, the information is usually there. Usually. Somewhere, buried deeper than most pharaohs. If you know where to look, and are patient, and have a supported browser (which is never the one you’re using) and after you install the necessary plug-ins….

You get the idea.

Government websites, especially those of local governments, are infamous for their opacity. And what’s really funny is that every candidate, if asked, will promise to make them better, easier, more transparent.

Then they get elected, and if anything changes, it’s usually worse than before. At least, it is in my experience.

I’ve been listening to these politicians for a long time. I’ve heard it all before—several times.

So, you can imagine my surprise when Tanveer Patel told me that she actually had done something about local government’s transparency issues.

Yeah, right. Blah blah, bored now. I have to admit, I initially blew her off. Before this election cycle, I’d never met her, and wouldn't have known her from Adam.

Then she told me what she’d done, and I actually bothered to listen. She told me that she’s developed an app to bring the same convenience and ease of use in accessing government information that we already have for…basically, the rest of the internet.

Imagine: a phone and desktop app that uses AI to make it easy to ask questions about what your government is doing (and NOT doing) with your money. About your problems. About actually making things work better, run more smoothly, and generally just make life a little easier for us all.

Then she showed me the platform, and I got to poke around on it—and I’m sold.

Full disclosure: anything that lets me ask for information in standard English, on my phone, while I’m sitting in my recliner? Yes, please. I love asking Siri fun questions, but Siri often disappoints. But, when it works—big joy!

Yes, my eyes crossed a little when Tanveer started describing what’s under the hood of her app. A Code Monkey, I am not. I know just enough about how platforms and programs work to be truly dangerous—and I think Tanveer’s concept is sound.

Tanveer wants to take all the videos of meetings—committees, council, whatever—and put them through an AI translator. This is done all the time. There’s a Chrome plug-in for YouTube that does this already.

What makes Tanveer’s idea so cool is that her app takes those transcripts, dumps them into a database with the minutes of the meetings and all those reams of reports—and has the AI grind and sort it. Then, the app has an AI interface like ChatGPT that lets you ask questions about what’s in the database. Questions like:

• What was talked about last meeting? Quick summary, please.
• What spending was approved?
• What spending was disapproved?
• Who voted each way?
• When will the approved projects start?
• When will they be finished?
• Whose brother-in-law’s business got the contract? (Can you tell I’ve lived in Alabama for a long time?)

I realize most people don’t or won’t care, and I get it. Politics is dreary, and most people have better things to do. Those of us who follow this stuff? We really need to get a life.

You don’t have to be a political junkie to appreciate what Tanveer Patel has built—a way for ordinary people to ask simple questions about where the money’s going, and how our Glorious Leaders are really doing their jobs.

Tanveer even has a way to pay for it by arm-twisting, erm, I mean soliciting corporate and private donations, and getting them to foot the bill. Not the taxpayers. Not our City.

I support this concept.

Tanveer told me she first came up with this idea a few months ago, after she got frustrated trying to find info on a municipal website—and I can believe it.

Now for the bad part: for this to work, it’ll have to have access to real data. The sample app you can play with on the website uses fake, placeholder data. It’s good enough that you can appreciate the power of the basic platform, but….

The real problem is going to be convincing our Glorious Leaders in City Hall to adopt it. Since it involves radical levels of transparency, ease of access, and ultimately, accountability from our government, I fully expect most of them to fight it tooth and nail.

But, that’s going to be an issue for after the election. Tanveer assures me that she intends to offer it to Hoover, regardless of whether or not she’s elected to Council Place 1 next Tuesday. I don’t think she’s lying to me about that, but like everything else in politics, I’m skeptical until it actually happens.

I do know that the way to get something like this implemented is pressure from the bottom up. The citizens of Hoover will have to demand it—and I think a lot will, once they get a good idea of what it can do for them.

Until then, go to this link. Click around on the page. Play with the demo app. Think about what it would be like to yell at your phone from the recliner, and ask it when your back yard will stop turning into Lake Hoover every time it rains.

Because the tech to do that has already been built, thanks to Tanveer Patel.

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