
Giving your community access: Creating an online meeting archive

Imagine the small town of Riverton.
The local school board was facing growing concerns from parents and community members. The board had recently made a series of decisions regarding budget allocations and curriculum changes that left many residents feeling in the dark. Misunderstandings and rumors quickly spread across social media, fueling frustration and suspicion. Recognizing the need for greater transparency and communication, the board decided to take decisive action to bridge the gap between themselves and the community. They initiated a plan to livestream all future board meetings, allowing residents to witness discussions and decisions as they happened.
To further their commitment to transparency, the board created an online archive of these meetings, making them accessible for later viewing. This move not only provided community members with the ability to stay informed but also allowed them to hold the board accountable in a constructive manner. Parents who had previously felt excluded from the decision-making process could now review discussions at their convenience and come to meetings prepared with informed questions and feedback. As a result, trust began to rebuild, and the community became more engaged, fostering a collaborative environment for addressing the town's challenges and opportunities.
Does this resonate? Continue reading as we explore how an online meeting archive can help foster a relationship of mutual trust between locally elected boards and their constituents and community members — something that is essential for good governance. Many people may not understand the governance structure or the decision-making process, which can lead to distrust of the board. Unfortunately, that lack of understanding can also lead to the spread of misinformation about board actions on social media and other places.
Giving your community access
The good news is that local governance boards can do many things to increase their transparency and open the governing process to community members. One crucial way is to make attending board meetings as convenient and easy as possible for the public.
They can do this by livestreaming their meetings for the convenience and preferences of people who cannot attend the meeting in person. (Some states and municipalities have or will be mandating that elected boards livestream their meetings.) Then they can record the livestream and make the recordings available for people to watch later.
Recording meetings and creating a searchable online meeting archive demonstrates a board’s desire to be transparent with community members. Everything elected officials say — including their deliberations, questions, comments and votes — are open to review by everyone. The data and other information presented to the board as part of their decision-making process are in the recordings as well.
Online recordings can foster engagement and trust, with everyone able to easily access the information they are searching for. Readily accessible meeting recordings can correct misinformation and put unfounded rumors to rest.
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Yes I'd love that checklistCreating an online meeting archive: What you need to know
Creating a searchable online archive of your meeting recordings takes planning. Just making the recordings available won’t be helpful to anyone who wants to find a particular board action, vote or deliberation. Searching through hours of video can be tedious and will quickly frustrate community members.
- You’ll need a dedicated website space to store the recordings, which will allow you to make sure the recordings are secure. This will help guard against unauthorized use of the recordings, such as video or audio manipulation or editing.
- The archive should be searchable and easy to use. Video content by itself is not searchable. Meeting recordings should be accompanied by the meeting agenda, meeting minutes and a transcript of the meeting if possible. The transcript or notes should include time stamps to indicate the date and time of the remarks. These additional documents are searchable and will help people find what they are looking file.
- Video files should have consistent naming conventions, such as the date of the meeting (082524, for example) and other identifiers. File naming conventions make it easier to sort and file meeting by date as well as making them easier to find in the archive.

Follow the regulations
Several states and other municipalities are beginning to mandate locally elected government bodies to broadcast their meetings. Indiana and Oregon have required their school boards to livestream their meetings starting in 2025. It’s a trend in governance transparency and two-way communication that is likely keep growing.
As you make recorded meetings available to your community and the public, it’s important to remember federal and local regulations that govern meetings also apply to livestreaming meetings and their recordings. The Americans with Disabilities Act requires public meetings must be accessible to hearing impaired individuals and others with disabilities. To accommodate, you must ensure that transcripts and closed captions are included in meeting recordings.
Sunshine or open meetings laws apply to livestream recordings, as well. When the board goes into legal executive session to consider human resources or confidential contractual negotiations, you do not have to livestream this part of the meeting. However, you will want to note in the recording the reasons for closed session. Any votes must be done in open session.
While you want the public to be able to access meeting archives, you’ll also need to keep the meeting data secure through your online platform. This will prevent the video and audio from being corrupted or manipulated.
A communications plan should be created to inform the public about the recording and archiving process. The availability of the recordings should be announced at meetings. Other outreach should include announcements on the community website, social media, emails and even physical mailings.
Board transparency grows with livestreaming
When Illinois’ Glenbrook High School District 225 board started to livestream its meetings, it didn’t have a way to include the agenda, supporting documents or closed captions.
Families and other members of the public had trouble finding the information they needed. It wasn’t clear which meetings had the information they were looking for. Their frustration about the board’s apparent lack of transparency made the board and administrators realize they needed a better solution for livestreaming and meeting archives.
The district now uses Diligent Community’s Livestream Manager, which provides a limitless archive of searchable board meeting recordings. “What Diligent Community allows us to do [is to] very clearly open the doors to how we are making decisions,” said Dr. R.J. Gravel, Glenbrook deputy superintendent. “While that creates some apprehension, the reality is, by allowing the doors to be open, we ultimately are able to refine our decisions and make them even better.”
Get support from Diligent Community
Enhancing community trust by giving them access to searchable meeting archives is a worthwhile goal. Whatever solution you choose must not present an excessive burden to board administrators tasked with putting the archive together and updating it. Balancing access with easy archive management requires an experienced technology partner. Diligent Community is a cloud-based software solution that is specifically designed for publicly elected and appointed boards.
The Livestream Manager feature integrates with your public website, and the livestreamed meeting appears directly beside the published agenda, so your community can follow along at home.
For added accessibility, live automated closed captioning can be enabled. Once the meeting is over, timestamped minutes can be added alongside the recording, and closed captions are discoverable through our powerful search feature, making it simple for your constituents to find the exact information they are interested in.
Find out how Diligent Community can help your board increase community access and inclusion. Request a demo today.