Publishing the meeting

The video shows an earlier workflow. The current steps below use direct publishing; the legacy Approve button has been removed.

Okay. So now we've put together the agenda, we've done the meeting, and we've generated the minutes. The only thing left to do is publish those minutes on our public records portal.

With ClerkDirect, every city gets its own public records portal. That is a public website that your residents can go to in order to see information about the meetings that you hold. If you look on the left-hand side here, we have Public Portal. This screen will show you some configuration options for your public portal. When you first set up ClerkDirect, you can use your city's colors, add your city's logos, and make other changes. I'm not going to dive too deeply into all of the configuration, but that is an option that you have.

Then, at the top right, there's a quick button that says Open Portal. This is the actual website for your public portal. This is what people would see when they come to this destination. Right now, we haven't published any meetings. The reason is that every meeting in ClerkDirect is private by default, because we don't want to accidentally expose information that is not ready to be exposed.

I'm going to publish the meeting that we just created minutes for, and I will also add the minutes here as well. I'll end up refreshing this page, and then we'll see the new meeting there. If I go back to Meetings and click on that meeting, we have Publishing Controls at the top here for each meeting. If I click that, it is set to internal visibility by default. So I'll choose Public, and then you can choose the files that you want to show as well.

In Publishing Controls, choose Public and select Choose Files. Saved PDFs and packets are available immediately. Select the minutes document to have ClerkDirect prepare its PDF when you save. Approval and signatures are not required to publish. If your team wants to review a document, use its document review sidebar for comments, reviewers, approval, and requests for changes.

Then go back to Publishing Controls, click Public, choose files, choose our minutes, and then save. If I go back to our public records portal and refresh, you can see we are showing one meeting. That was our September 1 City Council Meeting right here. We can actually see our minutes document like this, which any resident can go and download.

So that is your public records portal. You can publish the agenda or other supporting documents as well. We also support live streaming your meeting through Microsoft Teams or Zoom to this public records portal. If you integrate ClerkDirect with Teams or Zoom, you can get live, closed-captioned meetings that stream directly to the public records portal as well.