City Bureau Launches Documenters.org to Bridge Gap Between the Public and Public Meetings

Documenters.org will scrape, standardize and share information on public meetings at the city and county-level in Chicago and Detroit—all in one central location.
Documenters.org will scrape, standardize and share information on public meetings at the city and county-level in Chicago and Detroit—all in one central location.

City Bureau Launches Documenters.org to Bridge Gap Between the Public and Public Meetings

Your city officials are making big decisions. Documenters.org makes is making it easy to keep tabs. Chicago’s government bodies hold hundreds of public meetings every month, but the vast majority receive no media coverage and produce minimal records. The new Documenters. org will scrape, standardize and share information on public meetings at the city and county-level in Chicago and Detroit—all in one central location.

This new website complements City Bureau’s two-year-old Documenters program, which has been training and paying members of the public to document public governance meetings in Chicago since 2016. You don’t need to be a Documenter to use the site, but all are welcome to apply and join City Bureau’s community of civic-minded Chicagoans.

“As local news media shrinks around the country, coverage of meetings for things like police beats, local schools or even city council has dwindled. Not only does this affect daily news, it threatens the hard-hitting investigations that are rooted in that reporting. Most importantly, it has direct bearing on how people hold their officials accountable at the local level,” said Darryl Holliday, City Bureau co-founder and News Lab Director.

“Documenters.org is a tool designed to help everyday people access the knowledge they need to get civically involved and have their voices heard.” At Documenters.org, you can find locations, times, dates, official records and original reporting from more than 300 boards, committees and commissions in Illinois and Michigan. To date, it features more than 7,200 meeting minutes, agendas and summaries in addition to content created by City Bureau Documenters. More than 500 Chicagoans from 55 Community Areas have signed up for Documenters and 225 have been trained to document public meetings.

The next training and orientation dates for new Documenters will be January 28 from 5-7 p.m. at the Harold Washington Library, 400 S. State St., 8th Floor, Rooms 14-15.

Documenters.org was made possible by a community of volunteer coders, convened by City Bureau and ProPublica Illinois, as an open-source project called City Scrapers. City Bureau has created a special CityScrapers. org toolkit that shares the code and systems necessary for the program, paving the way for expansion to new cities.

“Documenters.org was built as a solution for Chicago, but we’ve found that the civic issues we sought to solve in our hometown are present across the country,” Holliday said. “Our platform is designed with that information gap in mind. We hope to see Documenters. org become a model for engagement and local access in and beyond Chicago and Detroit.”

For information on bringing Documenters. org to your own community, please contact our Documenters team at documenters@ citybureau.org.

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