Granicus® MinutesMaker™

Solutions for minutes annotation and integrated public records

President James Garfield once said that cities are “but the body of a nation… the people who inhabit its hills and valleys are its soul, its spirit and its life.” Today, as populations continue to grow, one thing remains consistent: the people are the heart and soul of a municipality, and the course of democratic government is of their own choosing. The function of the public meetings is to ensure the transparency of government, to encourage the public to participate, and to give them the tools for public debate. The often tedious job of coordinating the agenda and dissemination of public information falls to clerks—the backbone of transparent government. While clerks’ efforts to record, annotate and publish a formal record of all public proceedings can take an exhausting period of time, Granicus MinutesMaker solves the challenge with software for making their workflow before, during, and after public meetings more efficient than ever.

Granicus MinutesMaker allows clerks to dramatically reduce their administrative workload and begin delivering meeting minutes in hours, not days, weeks or months. Empowering clerks to focus on managing the meeting itself, Granicus automates the process of recording meeting actions and annotating the formal minutes. Granicus MinutesMaker takes these unprecedented productivity gains a step further with Granicus’ emerging industry standard for integrating public records which combines streaming audio or video recordings of the public meeting broadcast with the minutes document.

Create Polished, Complete Minutes In RecordTime
Granicus MinutesMaker is unique in its ability to automate much of the annotation process. Our straightforward, no-nonsense software enables you to record meeting attendance, motions, votes, speakers and discussion summaries automatically, in real-time. Granicus MinutesMaker saves clerks from the countless hours of manual effort producing the minutes typically spent long after the meeting has adjourned. This level of minutes automation means less work to record the same data, freeing clerks to accomplish more during the meetings than they ever have before. With Granicus MinutesMaker, the entire public record is easily created through a single interface that makes the public meeting administrative process entirely more efficient.

Save time by dramatically reducing the workload for preparing and coordinating public meetings and annotating and publishing the minutes.
Work more productively by automating the most tedious processes of annotating formal minutes from public meetings and organizing it in the most appropriate format.
Eliminate transcription errors and call-in questions or requests for information with software that publishes minutes with all related information, all while ensuring every minutes entry is consistent with the agenda, meeting actions taken, and required parliamentary procedures.
Distribute public information more efficiently by publishing minutes integrated with all related public documents and video or audio recordings of public meetings – all cross-linked and keyword-searchable.

Granicus Player View with Integrated Minutes

Granicus MinutesMaker is designed to maximize the efficiency of clerks and administrative staff before, during, and after public meetings. This process begins with the meeting agenda. Before a live public meeting starts, Granicus MinutesMaker helps avoid any necessity for re-typing agenda items by importing and automatically parsing your existing meeting agenda into the Granicus system. Whether your agendas were written in a word processor or in one of the many agenda management systems available on the market, Granicus makes the process painless. Later, these agenda items are used to automatically embed timestamps in the digital recording of a meeting, providing key index points that make it easy for constituents to watch only the parts of a meeting that are relevant to their interests. Prior to a meeting, clerks can also preload motions or attendees, publish an agenda in advance of the meeting, and schedule live webcasts that will record and publish the meeting automatically.

During and after the meeting, Granicus MinutesMaker delivers a host of critical features that have allowed hundreds of clerks throughout the country to save hours and even days of time, while the jurisdiction reaps thousands of dollars in cost savings. The power of Granicus MinutesMaker during a live public meeting is unrivaled in the industry, facilitating nearly complete automation of minutes annotation, with tremendous flexibility for accommodating standard and non-standard parliamentary procedures. Every action of the meeting—from taking roll call to recording or changing agenda items to managing speakers and time allotments to recording motions and votes—is automatically added to the minutes with only a few clicks. This natural process of building the minutes will automatically embed the recorded video stream with timestamps, resulting in the Granicus LinkedMinutes format.

Following a live public meeting, Granicus MinutesMaker makes the process of completing and publishing minutes as easy as possible, including an intuitive interface that allows the minutes to be cleaned up or further annotated as required. While editing any individual entry in the minutes, clerks can watch or listen to each associated portion of the recorded meeting to reference as desired.

Webcasts, minutes and related documents of the meeting can be published to your website manually or automatically. Recordings can be published separately from the minutes, enabling clerks to publish the minutes only after appropriate reviews and approvals. Once published, Granicus has automated the creation of an on-demand archive of the public meeting - now completely and automatically indexed against the agenda, linked to all associated documents, searchable by keyword, and easily accessible to staff and constituents 24x7.

LinkedMinutes™: Integrating the Public Record
LinkedMinutes is an emerging industry standard minutes format invented by Granicus to seamlessly and automatically unify the documents and recordings that make up the public debate. LinkedMinutes even exceeds the detail found in traditional minutes formats, eliminating the possibility of transcription error and drastically reducing call-in requests for information from both staff and residents.

With Granicus, clerks can do much more than just annotate minutes from public meetings and stream audio or video recordings of the meeting itself. LinkedMinutes ensures a complete, integrated public record—conveniently available to constituents with all relevant meeting information conveniently accessible 24x7. This combined record is completely keyword searchable and cross-linked, enabling constituents to see, read, and engage in the full public debate 24x7. By simply searching for what they’re interested in, or by clicking on a link within the minutes, agenda, or related documents, viewers are taken directly to the relevant portion of the recording of the public meeting. This eliminates the laborious and time-consuming task of rewinding and fast-forwarding through endless reams of VHS, CD, DVD or cassette tapes in search of just a few minutes of specific content. The end result is a dynamic archive of public meeting agendas, minutes, staff reports and all other supporting documents seamlessly indexed and integrated with audio/video recordings of the meeting.