Citizen Documenters’ summaries of public meetings are more readable and useful to the public than agency meeting minutes, according to a study by Nina Kelly, a doctoral candidate at Wayne State University, published in the Journal of Civic Information. 

The Documenters Network is a program started in 2018 by City Bureau that has trained 2,200 people in 11 cities on how to cover public meetings, summarize the proceedings, and report out to their neighbors. 

Kelly compared Documenters’ notes to meeting minutes for 46 meetings in Grand Rapids, Michigan, covering a city commission, board of education, historic preservation commission, and a handful of other governing bodies. She found that Documenters’ writings are more readable as measured by the Flesch Reading Ease and Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level metrics, and more concise and to the point.

Kelly also noted that the Documenters’ notes often included links to additional resources, such as news articles, video recordings, and government websites.

Her take-away: Programs like the Documenters have the potential to fill the civic accountability gaps left by the decline of local journalism as traditional news coverage of public meetings continues to dwindle.

Posted: April 3, 2025
Category: Brechner News
Tagged as: Brechner Freedom of Information Project, FOI, Government Transparency, open records laws