Creating an agenda

Okay, so creating an agenda. We just created our new meeting sequence, and now what do we want to do? We want to put together an agenda in advance of the meeting. We already went over all of these meeting details here, but what you'll notice is in the top left, we have a couple of tabs. We have Overview, which we're in now. We have Files, Agenda, and Minutes. So let's click on Agenda. This will load, and we'll see a screen where we can actually put together an agenda for the meeting.

Just to break this down, we have in the main view an agenda builder where we can add agenda items. You click here to add your first item. And then on the left-hand side of this little sidebar, we have Sessions. Sessions is for meetings that have multiple sessions. You may have an open session followed by a closed session in your meeting. For now, we just default to having one public session.

When we want to put together the agenda, you can click Add Your First Item, and you can give this agenda item a title and a description. So this might be something like Roll Call, or it might be Old Business, or what have you. And then when you add this, you'll see the agenda item has appeared here. You can click this little arrow, and it will expand this agenda item to show you details about it. You can attach files, add motions that you know are going to be discussed in this agenda item ahead of time, and link tasks to the agenda item as well. Those would be pieces of work that require a sort of project-management element, like, for example, following up on a director report or something like that.

Now, you can manually put together your agenda like this, and that will work just fine. You can continue to add sections to the agenda. If you click these three dots on the right, you can add an item above, add an item below, or even add a sub-item if you have sub-items in your agenda. You could do that manually.

The other, perhaps more efficient, workflow that you may want to consider is using Ava. So what is Ava? Ava is our AI agent that ships with ClerkDirect, knows everything about your ClerkDirect workspace, and can do work for you. If I click this Revise with Ava button here, then we'll pop open the sidebar. Ava says, “Revise the agenda for City Council Meeting.” Ava says, “I'm ready. What would you like changed?” Here, we can actually describe in words what we want Ava to do for us.

Or, if you already have a document with your agenda written out in it, you can just attach that document and tell her to use that. I'm going to do that one. If you click the plus button in the composer, you can select a source. This is basically any sort of input document that you would want to give to Ava, and you can choose it in this source picker. If I click Upload here, I can upload a file from my desktop, and I'm actually going to go ahead and upload this agenda and give that to Ava.

Ava will think for a second about that, and once the AI has read everything, it will go ahead and take the contents from that document and create this structured agenda that we see here. If I scroll down, we can see everything that was in that document is now in this structured ClerkDirect format. So this tends to be, if you have a document like that already, a very efficient way of importing your agenda into ClerkDirect's model. You'll be able to do that quite quickly.

Again, if I expand one of these items here, you can see that we can attach motions and files to these agenda items. One last thing that I'll show you is how to add a motion that you know you're going to want to add. Sometimes you know that you're going to be talking, for example, about a resolution or an ordinance. You can click Add Motion, and this pops open a dialog where you can add a motion title. So we can say, “Motion to pass Resolution XYZ.” Here, we don't know movers and seconders because we're not in the meeting yet. But you can add a description, and you can also add what we call a record number. The record number is basically a standard identifier for a resolution. Here we have RES-2026-005.

If I click Save, then that will attach this resolution number inside ClerkDirect's model to this motion. If I click Create, then we will see that this motion is now added to this agenda item here. We can also add motions with Ava. You just ask Ava in this chat, “Add this motion to this agenda item,” and that will work as well.

For now, that is pretty much everything you would need to know about creating an agenda in ClerkDirect. The next step, which we'll talk about in the next video, is taking that agenda and doing a live meeting.