Last year, Bellingham resident Morgan Foster wanted to know the outcome of a consequential school board vote in a nearby district.
Taken aback by the tone and tenor of the discussions regarding Title IX, Foster called the nearby district and then clicked through the website, eventually finding an MP3 file of the meeting. She listened to the “fuzzy recording” for two hours to get her answer.
Foster thought there had to be a simpler way to find out what was going on in local school districts. Her work history at Facebook, Twitter, Google and Mozilla gave the now-stay-at-home mom an idea.
One day while her young daughter was napping, Foster began to build a system from her home office that she now calls BoardLink, using artificial intelligence — specifically, a large language model, natural language models and machine learning models to do complex statistical analyses.
“There is a large amount of public data produced by organizations … which is not uniform in the way it is recorded,” Foster said. “I’m able to process it down into a common format and basically build the equivalent of a legislative tracker, except for any sort of governing body, whether that’s a nonprofit or school board or you name it.”
Washington school districts upload meeting files and minutes in all kinds of formats: YouTube or Zoom links, on Google Drive, as PDF files, as images of files and more.
Foster’s system can sort through it all, grab the data, clean it and present it to be analyzed using AI technology. Then, users can ask the system questions.
Foster gave the example of a group interested in protecting music programs. They could use the system to quickly find out what strategies have worked at districts around the state to preserve those programs.
Cascadia Daily News staff tested the software by reviewing the tool’s analysis of discussions about gender identity participation in athletics at Lynden School Board meetings. The result reflected what the reporter had witnessed in meetings she attended or reviewed.
The AI models Foster uses in her tool can locate documents and files on websites; translate images of notes into text through character recognition; transcribe audio files through speech recognition; and distinguish the semantic meaning of phrases from the exact words or phrases.
She’s so far collected 15 years of data for 95% of school boards in Washington, including all the public comments, all the votes that took place, all the contracts that have been approved, and more, in one location. That’s more than 50,000 documents.
Advances in AI over the last five years have made this possible, Foster said. Before, you would need to pay a team of software engineers to crawl these sites and process the data, she said. Now, she can use AI to get the data.
BoardLink is the basis of a partnership with California-based Educational Justice Academy, called JustEdTech. It also falls under Foster’s new company, Noosphere Analytics. She’s quickly forming partnerships with other organizations, including a company that builds social-emotional learning tools. Locally, she’s worked with the Chuckanut Health Foundation to track down disbursements of the Healthy Children’s Fund.
Foster’s friend Erin Lynch, president of the Chuckanut Health Foundation Board, immediately saw the vision.
“When it came to something as simple as, ‘Hey, what happened in that school board?’ And the challenge was just to figure out how to find out what happened, [Foster] immediately looked at it from a structural perspective,” Lynch said.
Foster’s goal is to make what’s going on at school board meetings more accessible to nonprofits and other groups. She said she hopes to “ease the pain” of fragmentation, likely to be worsened with changes at the U.S. Department of Education.
Lynch sees the potential for the system’s application to all kinds of public data: “How do we get more insights into what’s happening in the community around us?”
Foster hopes the tool can support organizations doing “good and wholesome” things. She continues to meet with potential clients, including one that is working to improve sexual health education in Massachusetts.
Foster said she’s focusing on partnerships with organizations right now to simplify the project and manage her costs, but said she would consider releasing public datasets in the future to potentially fill the gap left behind by a shrinking Department of Education.
“I don’t have the time or resources to do this at the moment, but I can imagine a point where it would be feasible for me to provide something like that as a way of both demonstrating the capabilities of my system and serving the public interest,” Foster said.
Charlotte Alden is CDN’s general assignment/enterprise reporter; reach her at charlottealden@cascadiadaily.com; 360-922-3090 ext. 123.
