Our toolkit

Defining the scope of your project is key to setting goals and maintaining focus but it can also help define the right tools for the right job. Early on, City Bureau staff used a simple spreadsheet and email system to send meeting information and assignments out to Documenters. Over time, we developed tools that helped not only our program to grow, but allowed us to nurture others. With the launch of the City Scrapers tool in 2017 and Documenters.org in 2019, digital tools have played a larger and larger role in network workflows. 

The section below outlines several of the tools we use, some of which you might explore: 

Documenters Network HQ — Documenters.org 
Documenters.org is a custom website with a special subdomain for each Documenters Network partner site. It’s most important job is to host two calendars: one of upcoming public meetings through which Documenters can apply for assignments, and the other of upcoming program events such as orientation, community of practice and special gatherings. Neither of these calendars necessarily have to be public. However, the public meetings calendar is a civic service that’s easy for us to provide. The program meeting calendar also helps new potential Documenters find and join gatherings. 

Data Management — Airtable
Airtable is a central tool for the Documenters Network. We use it to enroll participants, track training sessions, manage assignments and display at-a-glance metrics. For example, here’s a sample Airtable record for Documenter showing what information the database collects from application forms, training records and assignment data. 

• Profile

  • Name

  • Role

  • Gender

  • Race/Ethnicity

  • Programs

  • ZIP Code

• My Application

  • What issues in your community do you care most about and why?

  • How informed do you care about the issues you care about? On a scale of 1 (least) to 10 (most)

  • Choose the areas of expertise that best describe you

  • What skills do you hope to learn or improve by becoming a Documenter?

  • Where do you get your news and information?

  • How did you hear about the Documenters program?

• My assignments

  • E.g. 3/3 Cook County Commission on Social Innovation meeting 

• My trainings

  • E.g. Orientation, FOIA, Live Tweeting

Message Board — Discourse
The message board connects Documenters and staff with each other across the network. Messages can be viewed by everyone, select program sites or individuals. Keep these best practices in mind when building an online message board or listserve:

• Ask questions that can be answered by anyone in the online community

• Highlight good work and ideas from participants — and tag them in the post

• Push questions asked via email to the message board for collective workshopping

• Post civic opportunities like events, fellowships and job opportunities

• Encourage participants to post things they didn’t include in their reporting

• Invite participants to introduce themselves to the network

Payment system — Gusto
Compensating participants is core to our mission. All assignments are based on an hourly pay rate determined according to local conditions, however some assignments also include a minimum base rate. We recommend using your local living wage as a starting rate, along with periodic raises. For documenting public meetings, we pay a base rate that covers two hours for meeting attendance and an hour and half for follow up work such as pre-research, note cleaning and processing, photo uploading, and post-meeting communication.

Each local program designs and administers their own payment workflow and selects their own payment processing servicers. For Chicago assignments, City Bureau uses Gusto, a secure, cloud-based contractor payments service platform. Soon after Documenters are approved for their first assignment, they are sent an email invitation from Gusto to sign up. We recommend establishing a workflow to run payments for all approved assignments on a weekly basis at least. Once an assignment submission is received and approved by program staff, payment should be completed within a maximum of 8 business days. 

Media content — Google Drive
We have found Google Docs and Sheets to be the simplest way to transfer information from the Documenters, to program staff for review, and then to the public. When a Documenter is assigned to take notes on a public meeting, our website automatically generates and shares a Google Doc with Documenter and relevant program staff. The Google Doc is accessible and editable as long as the notes are tagged as “in progress” or “under review” on the back end of our website. When the notes are reviewed and approved, the Google Doc’s permissions change so that anyone with the link can view but only program staff can edit. Documenters may take notes in whatever format they prefer, but the final submission must be typed or copied and pasted in the Google Doc. A link to this Google Doc shared with the public on Documenters.org.

Scope and scale

Before we built Documenters.org, we defined city and county-level public meetings as our focus area and convened a group of civic coders to help us tackle an early roadblock. In 2018 we partnered with David Eads via ProPublica to develop the City Scrapers project—at the time, we wrote: 

"Public meetings are important spaces for democracy where any resident can participate in civic life and hold public officials accountable. But how does the public know when meetings are happening? It isn’t easy! These events are spread across dozens of websites, rarely in useful data formats. That’s why City Bureau worked with a team of civic coders to develop and coordinate the open-source City Scrapers project, which standardizes, scrapes and shares these meetings in a central database while offering opportunities for co-learning." 

The mission of the City Scrapers project was to increase access and transparency around public meetings across the U.S. by making it easier for everyone to know when and where public meetings are held. We’ve shared our open-source code since 2020, leading to similar projects launching in San Francisco, St. Louis and Cleveland.

We started by building a civic codebase and We've tested a range of cloud-based and crowdsource tools over the years including Google Drive, Airtable, Basecamp, Github, Gusto, Discourse, RapGenius (yes, the place where you go to find hip hop lyrics!) and many more—but one thing we find consistently is that...not every problem requires a tech solution. 

These days, we often hear from groups that want to document public meetings:

• occasionally, once or twice a month

• within a specific time period, focused on a specific topic or civic body

• comprehensively for a whole city, town or neighborhood

While paying people to cover public meetings once or twice a month can be a helpful operational baseline as you build out your proof of concept, that frequency is unlikely to keep community members engaged in the long term. Plus, offering limited assignments means there will be high competition for each job. With limited opportunities to maintain involvement or take assignments, Documenters may become frustrated and lose interest in the work. Each city will have a sweet spot of meetings/week based on local government meeting habits and the size of your Documenter community. 

Beginning with two to five assignments per month will help you better understand what it takes to train people, commission stories and edit reporting produced by community members. Once you’re established, we suggest creating reliable, weekly opportunities for interested community members to do paid work. If people are clamoring for more opportunities to participate, you're doing it right!