Democracy Innovations for Better Public Meetings

In towns and cities across America, elected officials and community members are working to extend civic participation, promote deliberative dialogue, and cultivate community trust. As leaders make improvements, they should consider renovating the foundation of local democracy: the official public meeting.

Why does local government need better public meetings?

Local government has the most direct impact on residents’ daily lives. City councils, school boards, and advisory boards and commissions serve as key venues where decisions about the look, feel, and function of communities take shape. These bodies are often governed by open meeting or “sunshine” laws designed to ensure transparency and structure public participation, creating formal opportunities for residents to be involved in decision-making.

Residents trying to influence these local policies have long done so by offering comments at official public meetings. The most involved residents might serve on a community board or commission. These procedures governing these modes of participation have largely gone unchanged, and over the decades, they have begun to show their limitations: long meetings and complex rules limit participation, residents walk away feeling unheard, elected officials struggle to hear representative input, and in some cases these miscommunications become contentious.

Better public meetings are possible, sustainable, & measurable.

The standard format for public meetings, closely structured by parliamentary procedure through rigid Robert’s Rules, has become an unquestioned fact of civic life. However, innovations in public meetings are possible. State laws governing local meetings often offer more leeway than realized.

Experimentation can allow public meetings to reach a broader audience and lift up new voices:

• Drawn from decades of research on civic participation and conflict resolution, there are proven tools to ensure civil, productive dialogue between diverse actors.
• Additional practices outside of public meetings can broaden public participation, providing greater information to guide policymaking.
• Digital tools allow officials to measure public satisfaction and trust in local democracy.

The Better Public Meetings Project

Since 2023, the Center for Democracy Innovation at the National Civic League has pioneered new tools in communities around the country. This included a first-of-its-kind Community and Council Forum to bring deliberative sessions to official council meetings in Boulder, Colorado. Working with city councils and school boards in cities, large and small, we have leveraged inclusive digital language tools, rebuilt neighborhood governance models, fostered youth engagement, and more.

If you are interested in making official public meetings in your community more civil, equitable, participatory, and productive, please contact us to learn more.

A Timeline of Our Approach

• From day one, we work with a team from the community to understand the local context. This also ensures that the process remains community-owned and that recommendations are community-specific.  
• We conduct a Civic Infrastructure Scan to explore factors influencing public meetings and the relationship between residents and local institutions. Through semi-structured interviews, media analysis, and review of reports and public documents, we offer a bird’s-eye view of civic life in your community.  

• We offer the Center’s Civic Engagement Scorecard as an ongoing measure of how residents view public meetings and the community. The Scorecard is a quantitative, user-centered ratings tool made possible through our partnership with ActiVote. It gives people an easy way to rate the quality of local democracy and civic health and conveniently visualizes this data for review.  

• After initial research, we facilitate an in-person Public Forum, a deliberative, facilitated dialogue where residents can directly share their perspective on improving public meetings and broadening civic participation.  

• Based on our findings, we provide a set of bespoke recommendations to use before, during, and after official public meetings. These typically include new pathways for representative participation, digital tools, and meeting formats.  

• We can also help implement these new tools through pilot programs, ensuring practices make it from report to reality.  

Your Role

To guide our work, we ask that communities identify an internal team of a few elected officials, staff members, or other leaders. We would meet check in with the internal team on at least a monthly basis (via video-conferencing), and they would provide the following types of support:

• Planning and research: The internal team will work with the community to determine project scope, including which specific public meeting warrants our focus. The internal team will also identify residents and leaders for interviews and review our research findings.
• Logistics: As part of the Public Forum or other in-person events, the internal team will secure meeting space, provide refreshments when possible, and ensure accessibility.
• Communication: Internal team members will be responsible for sharing the Better Public Meetings project with the public by creating a website landing page, promoting the Public Forum, and explaining the process to residents.

Past Work

Better Public Meetings has partnered with seven communities across the country. Innovations arising from the Better Public Meetings process have been introduced in cities like Boulder and Mesa in the form of deliberative study sessions, and implementation of other recommendations is underway in places like Anchorage, Alaska, and Rochester, Minnesota. Each of these cities have presented unique civic opportunities and challenges, leading us to create localized strategies catered to each context. You can explore some of our Civic Infrastructure Scans for prior partners below to learn more about the diversity of civic life and innovations we implement.

• City Council of Boulder, Colorado: Civic Infrastructure Scan and Recommendations for Improving Public Meetings
• Fayetteville Next Commission and Community Police Advisory Board in Fayetteville, North Carolina: Civic Infrastructure Scan and Recommendations for Improving Public Meetings
• Governing School Board in Mesa, Arizona: Civic Infrastructure Scan and Recommendations for Improving Public Meetings
• We are excited to share more information soon about our current partners:
  • City Council of Rochester, Minnesota
  • Community Councils in Anchorage, Alaska
  • City Council of Mountlake Terrace, Washington
  • Civic Engagement Commission and Community Boards of New York City

Contact us at [email protected] to bring Better Public Meetings to your community