A new website aims to increase transparency and access to all of Vermont’s 2025 legislative committee meetings.
All Vermont legislative committee meetings are livestreamed and the new website GoldenDomeVT.com will offer searchable transcripts of the meetings immediately after the videos are posted.
Website developer Tom Evslin worked in state government as Secretary of Transportation in 1981 and 1982. He is a former board member of Vermont Public and the Vermont Journalism Trust, which oversees the on-line investigative newspaper VTDigger. A retired high-tech entrepreneur, Evslin says he created the site because he is concerned about Statehouse news coverage as fewer reporters cover legislative proceedings.
“There are 25 standing committees. Reporters can’t be in all of the committee meetings. And yet all the things that are really important to getting good results from the legislature really happen in committee. So without that coverage, Vermonters don’t have a good idea of what their legislators are doing; don’t have a way to give legislators feedback while bills are still being considered. This session, I think, is going to be a particularly critical one. So I think making sure that what happens in the Statehouse is as transparent as it can possibly be is critical, especially given the shortage of reporters that we have,” explained Evslin.
Evslin notes that since the COVID pandemic the state of Vermont has been archiving all committee meetings. But he wanted an easier way for the public and reporters to access information from those videos.
“To go through a video to find a particular segment is still difficult and very time consuming. So it occurred to me that if there were written transcripts that could be searched by speaker or by topic or by keywords that those would make it much easier for reporters to cover committee sessions, even the sessions they weren’t able to be in,” Evslin said. “Because transcripts aren’t perfect, we needed something that I call SmartTranscript. Which is if you highlight any of the text, then it plays the video of just that clip so that you can actually listen to and see what was said and get the body language, get the tone and so on. So you get both the searchability of text but the full experience of video.”
Until the start of the 2025 session, GoldenDomeVT is in alpha mode, using a selection of committee meetings from the 2024 session for testing and feedback. New York Public Interest Research Group Executive Director Blair Horner checked out the neighboring state’s site.
“Being able to find the issue that you’re interested in is important and making it easy to find that information is, I think, a uniquely great thing that is added to the Vermont website. I’ve never seen that happen in New York,” noted Horner. ”New York does have transcripts of its floor debates, for example, but you typically have to sort of plow through the whole thing to find what you’re looking for. And so the easier you make that to happen the more likely it is that the public will be more informed and educated on how state policy making works out.”
Horner believes the Vermont website could be adapted for use in New York.
“There’s no technological reason why all those links could not be sort of put into one place so people could take a look at them,” Horner said. “The one significant problem that I can see is the Assembly would have to change its procedures in terms of keeping historical records of committee meetings for example and floor debates. And that way you could do the same kind of thing. But that’s the kind of thing that New York could use.”
Evslin says he wrote the code for GoldenDomeVT with the idea that it could be adapted elsewhere.
“It would be extremely easy for anything that’s on You Tube, which is where the Vermont Legislature’s stuff is, and just slightly more difficult if some other hosting platform is being used for the videos. But if it’s useful I think people will have very little problem using it in other contexts,” Evslin said.
Evslin plans to release the code used to create the website and SmartTranscripts as shareware. Use of GoldenDomeVT.com is free, there is no advertising and it does not require registration.
