Democracy Innovations for Better Public Meetings

In many places, official public meetings no longer work. By “official public meeting,” we mean meetings that are open to the public, where elected or appointed officials are present, and where policy decisions are being made (Model City Charter, 9^th edition). Most of the official interactions between citizens and local governments, school systems, planning boards, and police departments are full of frustration, conflict, and mistrust.

Bad public meetings are damaging because they:

• Lower public trust and confidence in government, making it harder to implement policies and maintain financial stability.
• Increase frustration and stress for public officials and staff.
• Lead to delays and erratic decision-making, which further erodes trust and wastes public funds.
• Worsen inequities because meeting participants are not representative of the communities most affected by policies.

Better public meetings are possible, sustainable, and measurable.

• There are proven tools and practices that can ensure civil, productive dialogue among people who have different backgrounds and interests.
• These practices can be adopted as part of official public meetings, in full accordance with open meetings laws.
• Before and after public meetings, supplementary tools and practices can reach broader audiences: providing information, gathering input, and reporting on decisions.
• Public satisfaction with public meetings, and the state of local democracy generally, can be measured through digital tools.

How the Process Works

The Better Public Meetings process is an iterative process in collaboration with local staff, officials, stakeholders and residents. It starts with creating a working group to help inform how research will be conducted, how public meetings will be evaluated by the public, how reporting back to the community is carried out, and how to design and adapt our recommendations for improvement of public meetings.

We worked with three pilot communities across the US to advance collaborative, best practices in official public meetings. We built upon standard best practices in the democratic innovation field and drew upon local democratic assets and actors such as, city officials (elected/appointed), non-profit organizations and networks, government departments and their staff, anchor institutions (libraries, universities etc.), neighborhood groups and engaged residents. By creating a localized strategy catered to context specific situations, those convening official public meetings worked with us to design an inclusive and collaborative formal process with the public.

Innovations arising from the Better Public Meetings process are currently being implemented in Boulder and Mesa, in the form of participatory study sessions. Traditional study sessions are only open to public viewing rather than public participation with elected officials. We are working with local officials and staff to design, facilitate and implement an engagement process within these formal study sessions.

Two forms of research support our work:

• A Civic Infrastructure Scan to help local leaders understand the factors influencing civil discourse, including the recent history of engagement, skills and capacities present in the community, and the state of conversation online. Each scan consists of semi-structured qualitative interviews with key local leaders/organizations, media and social media analysis, and desk research on civic assets of their communities.
• A Civic Engagement Scorecard, which is a quantitative “user-centered” data-gathering tool hosted on the Alchemer platform. It gives people an easy-to-use tag-based system to rate the quality of democracy and civic health in their official public meetings. It also offers various ways to visualize collated data. The scorecard is tailored to a specific community’s context and type of public meeting (school board, commission, city council, etc.). Try the demo.

The Center can now apply those lessons and tools in our work with cities to make official public meetings more civil, equitable, participatory, and productive. Please contact us if you are interested in a partnership that would benefit your community.

Pilot Community Reports

• City of Boulder: Civic Infrastructure Scan and Recommendations for Improving Public Meetings
• City of Fayetteville: Civic Infrastructure Scan and Recommendations for Improving Public Meetings
• Mesa Public Schools: Civic Infrastructure Scan and Recommendations for Improving Public Meetings

Partners

International City/County Management Association, National League of Cities, Bloomberg Center for Public Innovation, Participedia, Kettering Foundation, Cities Fortifying Democracy, Democracy Cities.

Funding Organization 

AAA-ICDR Foundation