Topics (or X) Timeline in Meeting and Instance as a Whole

[evamaxfield]

Idea / Feature

Add another tab to the event page tabbed container that breaks down the meeting into a timeline of topics.

This is different from minutes item segmentation described in #9.

Minutes Item Segmentation is useful for jumping to the start of a section of a meeting where as topic tagging / timeline would be useful for jumping right to the point in a meeting where a more general topic is discussed. "Housing", "homelessness", etc.

Additionally, this frontend visualization should be portable, because we may want to reuse some timeline visualization for the whole instance. I.e. Show me the meetings as a timeline and the topics discussed in those meetings.

Use Case / User Story

I want to see the overall topics discussed during the meeting. "What, 'in general' is my council discussing right now or in this meeting?"

Show me the cadence of meetings that discuss a topic.

Solution

Take this as inspiration but not as the solution:

My reasoning here is that I would hope our solution may be more general. The backing data can be meetings instead of sentences (or maybe that is an entirely different viz). Or we can swap out what it is marking (entities instead of topics for example -- "show the timeline of which bills were discussed over the last meeting(s)").

Stakeholders

Whole team discussion. This would be our first entrance (outside of #9) into more analysis NLP type stuff and while topic clustering is pretty defined and pretty "safe". Could be wrong on that though and thats why the discussion would be valuable.

backend team would need to define the topic storage model and add NLP pipeline to extract topics -- how fine grain we get about topics is also up for discussion.

frontend and ui team would need to work on data visualization for multiple pages.

Major Components

Dependencies

There are no dependencies! 🎉 Our transcript format is somewhat "ready to go" for this type of analysis

Other Notes

We may want to bring on a data scientist for this problem.