How Said in Council works

City of Johannesburg council sittings run for hours and are streamed on the City's YouTube channel, but almost nobody can watch them. Said in Council turns each sitting into chapters, named speakers, promises and decisions, with a full transcript, and links every item to the second of video it comes from.

How it is made

• Audio comes from the City's own livestreams. Speech is transcribed by machine.
• An AI model writes the chapters, picks out promises and decisions, and names speakers.
• A speaker is named only from the official list of councillors for that council term, and only when the transcript itself identifies them, for example when the Speaker calls on them. Otherwise they are shown as "Unidentified".
• Sittings are published automatically as AI drafts and labelled as such. A person reviews them when they can; a reviewed sitting loses the label. Every chapter and claim links to the video so you can check it yourself.
• Some lines carry small markers ("claim", "emotive"), and answers to councillors' questions are marked answered, partly answered or not answered. These are judgments by Jev, a TypeSafe AI model that returns a probability rather than writing text. They describe how something was said, not whether it is true, and they are never combined into an overall score.
• Ward maps use the ward boundaries published by the Municipal Demarcation Board (the 2020 delimitation used for the 2021 election, and the 2026 one), the producer and custodian of that data. They are simplified for the web here, so they are not the Board's own product, and if you live right on a ward boundary, check your ward with the IEC. Suburb names and the few suburb outlines on the ward maps come from © OpenStreetMap contributors, under the Open Database Licence (ODbL); OpenStreetMap does not name every suburb, so some wards show few or none. "Use my location" checks your position against these maps inside your browser and never sends it anywhere.
• Attendance figures come from the City's own signed minutes, not from AI. "Absent without leave" is only counted when the minutes neither list a councillor as present nor excuse them, and no similar name appears that day.

Check before you quote

The video is the record; everything here is a guide to it. Machine transcripts get names and non-English speech wrong, and AI summaries can misattribute. Every chapter, promise and transcript line has a timestamp: open it and listen before you rely on it.

Words used in council

Executive Mayor and MMCs

The Executive Mayor runs the City with a mayoral committee. Each MMC (Member of the Mayoral Committee) is a councillor the Mayor appoints to run one portfolio, such as Finance or Health, and answers council's questions about it.

Ward and PR councillors

A ward councillor is elected directly by the voters of one ward. A PR (proportional representation) councillor has no ward and gets a seat from their party's list, in proportion to the party's votes.

Speaker and Chief Whip

The Speaker chairs council sittings and rules on procedure. The Chief Whip of Council, from the governing side, works with the parties' whips on discipline and the running of council business.

Section 79 committee

An oversight committee council sets up under section 79 of the Municipal Structures Act. In Johannesburg most of them each check one MMC's portfolio, with councillors from several parties.

SDBIP

The Service Delivery and Budget Implementation Plan: the City's yearly plan of what the budget will deliver, with targets for each quarter.

Financial year and quarters

The City's financial year runs from 1 July to 30 June, so "quarter one" is July to September.

Ordinary and extra-ordinary meetings

Ordinary council meetings follow the year's schedule. Extra-ordinary (special) meetings are called in between for particular business.

Rules

"Rule 105" and the like are the council's Standing Rules and Orders; see Council rules.

Photos

Some councillor pages show a small photo so you can tell who is who. Photos come only from the parties' own public pages and the City of Johannesburg's, and each one is credited with a link to the page it came from. A photo is used only when that page names the councillor in full and the name fits exactly one person on the official list; anything less certain is left out. If you are pictured and want your photo taken down, or a photo shows the wrong person, ask through corrections (below) and it will be removed.

Feeds

Two RSS feeds, for a feed reader or a newsroom alert: new sittings (each sitting page as it is published, with the first sentences of its summary), and promises (a deadline passing with no word that it was done, a later sitting or a City newsroom article coming back to a promise, a match in an official City document). Each item is dated by the event itself, not by when the site was rebuilt, and says where a label is an AI judgment.

Corrections

No corrections yet. Each correction will be listed here with the date it was made.