Hamlet, a start-up founded by Sunil Rajaraman in 2022, aims to use humor as a civic engagement tool by posting funny clips from public meeting recordings from communities across the US, reports Nieman Lab.

Hamlet launched an app for Apple TV in December, but the company is primarily focused on its TikTok and YouTube Shorts channels. The content on their platforms features clips such as a woman speaking at a City Council wearing a full-body cockroach costume, a man complaining about Christmas lights being up two weeks before Halloween, etc.

Hamlet founder Sunil Rajaraman became obsessed with public meetings in the course of an unsuccessful campaign for an Orinda City Council seat in 2022. He noticed that many communities across the country had begun recording theirs since the pandemic. Rajaraman saw that trove of recordings as an opportunity for AI, combined with human verification, to “make public data easy to understand at the local level in a way that just wasn’t previously possible.”

“I think you can use humor as a device to get people interested,” Rajaraman said. “It’s sort of the anti-Nextdoor and Citizen…rather than using crime and fear as a way to get people engaged, what if you used humor?”

The videos aren’t just selected by AI. A person reviews the videos to verify “that it’s not something that isn’t, in fact, humorous,” he said. “It turns out you need people to do that.”

The Hamlet team has searched from a broad dataset of the past 10 years of public meetings, using some from its own library and some posted publicly on YouTube. (Members of the public can also submit clips for consideration.) From that wide swathe of samples, “we came up with a broad set of things that could be humorous,” Rajaraman said, which is when the human verification comes in to determine what’s actually worth posting.

Besides citizens, Hamlet has sparked interest among businesses: Rajaraman has received many requests from real estate developers and data center developers. These companies wanted to understand individual communities’ attitudes and voting patterns on development; they stood to gain from the information buried in public agendas and meeting recordings, and they were willing to pay for it. Clients can also search public meeting videos for potentially relevant clips, and search transcripts for key terms and speakers. Rajaraman said Hamlet plans to work more with governments in the future though he’s still deciding what shape that may take.

Hamlet also offers the tech to local journalists for free. Rajaraman said a few journalists are already taking advantage of this, and expects to offer the free product to journalists more widely by next month.

However, the start-up’s primary mission is getting more people civically engaged at the local level.

“I want people to know the barriers to entry to getting involved in your community are much lower than you think, and you should do it,” he said. “Let’s try to get dozens of people in there. And if they come in for the humor and stay for the comment, that’s a win.”