Practical guides on agenda management, ADA compliance, open meetings law, and the day-to-day work of running public meetings.
— made specifically for local governments.
The most revealing question you can ask an AI minutes vendor is not how accurate it is, but how many things it will ask your clerk to check. A tool that returns all 35 items for confirmation has not done the work, it has moved the work. Medicine already ran this experiment: an aid that marks everything failed to improve accuracy across 323,973 screenings, and degraded the best readers on the hardest cases.
Read the postEveryone sizes the minutes problem by population. That's the wrong denominator. Workload scales with the number of public bodies you carry — and open meeting law defines a public body by what it does, not how important it is. The quarterly advisory subcommittee owes a record built to the same standard as the council, and it's where the exposure actually sits.
Read the postTurnover among chief local election officials hit 41% in 2024, the highest in two decades of data, and 46% of governments say the biggest retirement wave is still ahead. But the largest study ever done found turnover doesn't meaningfully degrade performance — because continuity lives in routines and records, not in one person's memory. What that means for the undocumented layer in your office.
Read the postOhio's Sunshine Law never requires a public body to publish an agenda, and notice of a regular meeting is time and place — full stop. Ohio moved its legal weight to the back end: the minutes standard, the executive-session motion, and a $500 forfeiture with a mandatory injunction behind it. Plus why R.C. 121.221's new virtual-meeting authority excludes almost every elected board in the state.
Read the postThe annual license is the smallest number in the contract. The implementation fee, the archive migration, the yearly escalator, the storage overage, the staff hours, and the cost of getting your data back out are where the money actually goes. A line-by-line TCO worksheet to bring to every demo.
Read the postSpeech-to-text has gotten very good at what was said. Deciding who said it is a separate, much weaker technology — and it's weakest on one-word roll-call votes, the exact thing open meetings law requires you to attribute by name. What the accuracy numbers actually mean, and how to build a record that doesn't depend on a microphone guessing right.
Read the postAI can turn a three-hour meeting into a clean draft in minutes. But the same models can invent sentences no one said — and once your board approves them, those sentences become the legal record. Why the human-approval step is the whole ballgame, and how to build a workflow that survives a public-records request.
Read the postIllinois gives an ordinary citizen something almost no other state does: a way to get a binding legal ruling against your board without hiring a lawyer. Between the Section 2.02 agenda rule, the Attorney General's Public Access Counselor, and the disaster-declaration remote-meeting framework, Illinois is the most enforced open-meetings regime in the country.
Read the postFor fifty years Washington's OPMA required no agenda. Then ESHB 1329 added one in 2022 — RCW 42.30.077, a 24-hour online agenda rule — and deliberately made it nearly unenforceable. Why the legislature did both, and what it means for regular versus special meetings.
Read the postNew York requires no agenda — and that surprises clerks from other states. The obligations that actually bind are the Section 104 notice rule, the Section 103(e) 24-hour document-posting requirement added in 2021, and the Section 103-a videoconferencing framework.
Read the postEvery California clerk can recite the 72-hour rule and the no-action-on-non-agenda-items rule. Far fewer can walk through AB 2449's teleconferencing framework, the Sec. 54957.5 packet-disclosure standard, or the cure-and-correct demand under Sec. 54960.1.
Read the postEvery Texas clerk can recite the 72-hour rule. Far fewer can name the case law that defines "sufficiently apprises," the population thresholds that trigger Sec. 551.056 website posting, or the 2019 amendments that rewrote how walking-quorum prosecutions work.
Read the post"Reasonable notice" is the statutory phrase. Forty years of AG opinions and appellate decisions have given it a much more specific meaning than the words alone — and the digital posting era added a layer the original drafters never anticipated.
Read the postThe HB 21-1110 grace period ended in July 2025. Here's what Colorado's digital accessibility law actually requires of your agenda packets, where most clerks are still exposed, and how to close the gap before a complaint forces the issue.
Read the postAcquisitions and consolidation are part of the software landscape. Here's how to read a contract for renewal, bundling, and auto-renewal terms — and the questions worth asking any vendor before you commit to a multi-year deal.
Read the postA fair look at what each platform is built for, how they fit different sizes of government, and how Govably's AI minutes work alongside the tools you already use. Yes, we make one of them — we will say so when it matters.
Read the postPosting the agenda PDF the day before is the bare legal minimum. A live portal — votes updating in real time, packet documents accessible without a login, public comment sign-up from any phone — changes how citizens experience their own government.
Read the postTitle II covers your meetings. Most clerks know that, but few know what it actually requires for agendas, minutes, public comment, and digital documents. Here is what compliance looks like in practice.
Read the postA practical, week-by-week plan for clerks ready to retire the Word-and-email agenda workflow. What to migrate first, what to leave behind, and how to bring council members along without a revolt.
Read the post30 minutes. No pressure. Built for small local governments.
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