The official record of every open public meeting

Why the open-meeting record has to be right and reachable

A city council, school board, planning commission, or special district acts in public, and the record of that action is public too. The agenda has to be posted, a quorum has to be present, votes are taken by roll call, and the minutes become part of the official record any resident, reporter, or attorney can ask to see. When that record lives in a clerk's Word file or a scattered set of PDFs, a routine question — did the board have a quorum, what was the vote on that item, where are last spring's minutes — turns into a scramble. Open-meeting expectations vary by state, but the common thread is the same: the body has to be able to produce an accurate record of what it did in public.

What MinuteSmith does

• Agenda to minutes in one flow. Build the agenda, run the meeting, and get minutes that capture each item, the motion, its mover and second, the roll-call vote, and whether a quorum was present — without a clerk transcribing from a recording by hand.
• Roll-call votes and quorum on the record. Each vote is captured member by member with the tally, and quorum is noted for the meeting, so the record shows exactly how the body decided and that it was empowered to decide.
• One searchable run of every meeting. Ask AI reaches across every public meeting the body has held and answers with a citation to the exact meeting and item, so finding what a council or board did last year takes seconds, not an afternoon in the archives.

What you keep

• Posted agendas and adopted minutes for every public meeting
• Roll-call votes with each member's vote and the tally
• Quorum determinations and attendance for each meeting
• A searchable, multi-year record of the body's public actions

Ask your archive

Questions this record can answer — every answer cites the exact meeting it came from:

• “What was the roll-call vote on the budget at the last council meeting?”
• “Did the commission have a quorum at its March meeting?”
• “When did the board take action on that rezoning, and how did each member vote?”
• “Which agenda items were continued to a future meeting?”

Security & data handling

Private AI over your own records — your minutes are never used to train AI models. See the Trust Center and Security page; for a procurement or security review, contact our security team.

Frequently asked questions