Since 2016, the Documenters program has paid and trained community members to witness and take notes at local public meetings. The program originally emerged to equip residents to fill local information gaps created by declining journalist capacity—such as covering some police board meetings—but also to provide space for residents to connect and learn about their community together.

In the last decade, our Documenters program has spread across the country while our information landscape has also changed dramatically.

More than 5,000 Documenters across more than 20 communities are still documenting public meetings and learning together, but under new conditions: AI-powered transcript tools are filling some gaps in public record-keeping, many Americans are overwhelmed by the sheer amount of information they receive, and it’s harder for a single news source—including Documenters’ work—to break through the noise to reach people. During our strategic planning process, we took a step back with our partners to assess what these changing conditions mean for the future of the Documenters program. 

Now, we envision a new iteration of the Documenters program that leans further into the local context and human relationships that community members hold: equipping Documenters as trusted messengers in their communities who spread verified, useful civic information on every block. The Documenters program will still inform, engage, and equip participants and their communities with information about local public meetings, but we will design and test new assignment types in which Documenters pinpoint the most actionable elements from meetings to cut through overwhelm—and get that information to their neighbors. Over the next two years, we will work with our founding program in Chicago and our trusted partners across the country to design, experiment, refine, and adapt Documenters assignments, workshops, and gatherings to achieve that vision.

All the while, we’ll help new communities adopt the program and join the movement, including by testing more flexible options. We’ll keep evolving our award-winning platform Documenters.org to enable the program’s impact at scale and test new tools to support local programs and individual Documenters. We’ll work with our partners running Documenters sites across the country to build sustainable programs with deep roots and broad support. And we’ll continue to steward a dynamic and resilient Documenters Network, in which local organizations and communities build meaningful relationships, exchange practices and learnings, and move collectively toward a more participatory democracy.