Government bodies in Chicago hold hundreds of meetings each month that are supposed to be open to the public under the Open Meetings Act.

The problem:

The vast majority of these public meetings receive no media coverage and produce minimal public records.

Our solution:

We train and pay people to attend these meetings and publish the results in collaboration with local journalists.

 
 
 

Together we're building a new public record at Documenters.org:

Featured
The Weekly Ledger:

Weekly reporting and analysis from our unique database, complete with news tips and featured stories—sent directly to your inbox.  

Original Coverage:

Live-tweet threads, meeting notes, audio, video and more—produced by City Bureau’s trained Documenters.

Centralized Documents:

Official local government meeting minutes, voting logs, agendas and transcripts presented, for the first time, in one central location.

The Meeting Calendar:

A full calendar of local public governance meetings designed with transparency and civic education in mind.

 
 

Documenters.org will launch in Chicago and Detroit in January 2019.

Contact us to discuss how we can help scrape, standardize and share your cities’ public meetings: documenters@citybureau.org