Committee management

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Work

As a Democratic Services officer
I need to manage committees, agendas, and meeting papers in one place
So that I can run transparent, efficient governance without being tied to a proprietary vendor

Hammersmith & Fulham Council is leading the development of an open-source committee management tool, and the Discovery phase has already begun. 

The core build will deliver committee and meeting management, agenda and minutes workflow, document pack compilation, role-based access controls, and a public facing portal — with data migration considered from day one, not bolted on at the end.

What the tool will do

The new governance tool will cover everything a Democratic Services team needs to run committees and public

meetings.

For staff:

• Create and manage committees, meetings, and a corporate calendar in a central workspace
• Build and publish agendas with automatic page numbering and itemisation
• Compile meeting packs and make changes without reprinting or redistributing papers
• Role-based access controls for restricted and exempt items
• Reusable templates for consistent agenda and minutes formatting
• Configurable workflows for report submission, review, approval, and publication
• Automatic email distribution of agenda packs to members and attendees
• Attendance recording and in-app voting for live and remote meetings

For members:

• Annotate documents
• Offline access to meeting papers
• Notifications for updates to meetings and committees

For residents:

• A public-facing portal for agendas, minutes, and decisions — using the council's own CSS and navigation, not a bolt-on portal
• Full-text search across committee records, designed to work with partial information
• Online petitions: submit, sign, track, and receive automated updates when thresholds are reached

There will be WCAG 2.2 AA compliance throughout.

Estimated time/ cost

Chicken’s day rate for this project is £600 + VAT.

Discovery — funded by Hammersmith & Fulham Council, in progress.

Core build — £65,000

The complete tool: committee and meeting management, agenda and minutes workflow, document pack compilation, role-based access controls, public-facing portal, search and archive, member registers, and data migration.

Additional features can be scoped and funded separately by participating councils.

At five councils, each funder pays ~£13,000 — less than a single year’s licence fee with most proprietary suppliers, and at the end of it, every council owns the tool outright.

Fund this work

If you’re interested, please contact Will.