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Worcester’s OneMeeting portal translates documents into more than 30 languages, and meeting agendas include links to recorded and livestreaming council meetings.
On July 1, the city of Worcester launched a public meeting document management platform designed to enhance transparency by providing access to agendas, minutes and documents for the city’s nearly 120 boards and committees.
OneMeeting centralizes all documents and provides robust search options by both committee and specific agenda items, along with built-in translation for more than 30 languages through Google Translate.
The new system uses two search tools, Meeting Search and Item Search, along with a list of current and upcoming meetings and a general archived meeting database sorted by committee. Meeting videos are embedded into the agendas, providing easy access to streaming and recordings.
City Clerk Nikolin Vangjeli said plans to implement a new agenda and meeting management system had been “a long time coming.” His office had been trying to find ways to improve its Council Calendar system — a platform that was developed in-house and had been in use since 2006 — but were hampered by two problems: the system worked well for internal staff uses, but it lacked desired transparency and accessibility features; and the agendas and minutes were not formatted consistently, making specific items difficult to find.
Vangjeli noted that Worcester is “a bilingual community” for all its election operations, ballots and election materials, “but that was never the case with our agendas when it comes to City Council.” Any new system had to have translation options as well.
Vangjeli, who has been with the city since 2013 and became city clerk in 2020, said overhauling Worcester’s agenda management system was one of his goals. He said preserving existing content was a priority, so he told vendors that the city “wanted to integrate all the historical items that we’ve been building not only as a city, but also as a city council.”
Worcester’s chief information officer, Michael Hamel, worked with Vangjeli and the clerk’s office on the meeting document system overhaul. The project went out to bid in 2020.
Vangjeli said a number of larger cities, including Boston, Los Angeles, and San Antonio also use OneMeeting for meeting material management.
Hamel said that the system is designed to simplify some of Worcester’s governmental processes, like the existence of two separate agendas for the City Council and city manager during council meetings. Those agendas have been consolidated into a single searchable document.
Residents can “understand what’s on the agenda without needing to understand the mechanics of City Hall,” Hamel said.
OneMeeting even includes each committee’s pending list of items that aren’t yet on an agenda, which are consistently updated and available online.
“I think one of the issues we always heard was trying to have everything in one place,” Vangjeli said. “And now we finally do. We made a lot of progress as a city with this new product. to bring everything together into one portal.”