The Missoula Chamber partners with one of its members to creates a statewide advocacy tool.

The Missoula Area Chamber of Commerce, in partnership with one of its members, DemocracyLab (Mark Frischmuth), have created a FREE statewide advocacy tool for businesses, organizations and citizens of MT. The Missoula Area Chamber of Commerce CEO Kim Latrielle spearheaded the fundraising for the project via all Chambers in the State of MT. This new advocacy tool was financially supported by six Chambers who raised enough money to cover the hard costs to launch.
The new digital engagement tool (linked below) that will enhance all Montanan's "Right to Know" about the upcoming state legislative session. DemocracyLab, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit with a mission to empower people who use technology for public good, is deploying an instance of the Council Data Project for the Montana state legislative session through its Open Montana initiative. This tool will help our members and the general public understand and react quickly to developments in the legislative session by creating a searchable interface for the 9,000+ hours of video that are expected to be produced.
This tool was sponsored by the following Chambers (Missoula, Helena, Big Sky, MT Chamber, Kalispell, Great Falls) and provides every citizen, business, state agency, organization in Montana the following:

• scrape the state government's website daily for new videos from the MT legislative session
• transcribe these videos using Google's transcription services
• make these transcripts searchable
• provide users with search results ranked by relevance
• allow users to easily jump to the most relevant portions of videos
• allow users to share links to a specific moment in a video
• integrated with the Montana Free Press' Capitol Tracker

Our hope is that this tool will help our business members better advocate for their interests and result in better and more transparent government in Montana.

Montana Legislature Data Project